Bios 1.16 weirdness (x220)

Has anyone taken receipt of a brand new X220 over the last few days and found that, despite arriving with Bios 1.16 already installed, the fan STILL spins at 3500 rpm, even at idle?

 

Try updating to 1.17.

 

I'm going to when I get to find the link but just wondering how it could do that with 1.16?

 

Powered up this morning. Fan started at around 2900 and I thought the issue had sorted itself out. But 30-60 seconds later, it ramped up to 3490 rpm. All I had open was Power Manager, HWiNFO32, and one page of Chrome.

May try 1.17 but intrigued to know why it's behaving like this with 1.16 .

BTW, ambient temp is about 20 celcius. One thing of note is quite a big gap between the two cores. One currently says 41, while the other is 47.

 

I thought 3500 rpm was the default? I changed it to 2000 rpm with TPFancontrol and can't here the fan now. Do you use balanced system power and cpu hibernate in your power manager profile?

 

IIRC, 3500 was the default for 1.15. 1.16 came out about 3-4 weeks ago in order to 'reduce the annoying fan noise', according to Lenovo.

Machines are now being despatched with 1.16. Mine arrived yesterday.

I'd rather not use TPFancontrol.

 

If I turn off TPFancontrol I have an idle rpm of 3500 and haven been using 1.16 from the beginning.

 

That's exactly why I chose not to muck around with TPFancontrol.


1.16 came out towards the end of May and, for the people who posted, reduced the fan by 500 rpm as long as the cpu temp stayed below a certain level (I think mid-fifties?)

Here's discussing it (scroll down to post 1094):

http://forum.notebookreview.com/lenovo-ibm/568751-thinkpad-x220-i-t-owners-thread-37.html


and the release notes:

http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles/8duj06us.txt

 

What is exactly is your reason? With Fan setting 1 (2000 rpm) the laptop is effectively silent when the HDD is off (my HDD is way louder than the Fan then) and temps remain cool. If temps exceed a certain value I return control to the BIOS, which happens very rarely. So I don't see why I shouldn't use TPFancontrol.

 

I would be inclined to give Lenovo the opportunity to make bios adjustments so that the machine runs reasonably quietly when not pushed. This they did with 1.16.

Only if they failed to address the issue would I resort to using a third-party controller.

If bios 1.16 almost completely resolved the fan noise issue for my previous x220, and many others, what would be the point of using TPfancontrol? I'm glad it worked for you but any chance of moving on, dude?

 

Well I was just mentioning TPFancontrol because according to your initial post 1.16 didn't solve the "problem".

 

I appreciate your help. It was more a case trying to understand why a brand-new machine was acting out of sorts, than looking for a quick solution. But thanks anyway.

 

David, I've been rocking 1.16 and it idles much lower. I don't know the exact idle speed, but I don't hear the whining at all anymore at idle. I believe someone said 2000 rpm and below the whine isn't heard? So mine must be around that or below at idle. So I guess I'm trying to say that I'm not experiencing the weirdness you describe.

As an aside, I'm not using tpfancontrol and have never used it on this computer. I updated from 1.15 and had 1.11 previous to that.

 

It should be around 3000 rpm for light use. Yeah, it seemed to initially idle at under 2k !

 

Updated to 1.17. Fan seems to be just under 3k so far. Looks like the factory set version of 1.16 runs faster than the version released in May.

 

When was it that the whining actually became noticeable? Was that over 3000?

I'm quite happy with 1.16 as I rarely hear the fan, although my machine runs a little warmer. I really liked on 1.11 my laptop was always cool to the touch, granted the fan was super annoying. Now the bottom of my laptop is warm with the same use. Not hot by any means and still quite cool, but warmer. Ha, wish I could get the best of both worlds. I think that would require using tpfancontrol and getting a fan that doesn't whine.

 

Yes, the drop from 3.5k rpm to 3k is significant in reducing whooshing and whine, though not eliminating it. That's why 1.16 was so welcome three weeks ago.

Anyhow, I wish I had just updated to 1.17 yesterday morning, as it would have saved me energy and time making this thread, and being unnecessarily worried.

I wonder if other people receiving a new X220, with this pre-installed version of 1.16, also have fans running at 3.5k as default. Or whether mine was a freak occurrence .

 

I hear ya. I made a thread about the cpu perma throttling and after a day of researching... I put the battery back in. Problem solved. My old laptop was fine without the battery so I figured no problem.

So I definitely understand how it goes.