Arch Linux

Roken

Member

From: South Wales, UK

Registered: 2012-01-16

Posts: 1,366

Fan speed?

Let me start by saying that I have no problem with temps or CPU speed management - both are well within normal limits. However, over the past few days ( since kernel V 3.2.7 started IIRC) my fans don't seem to be throttling down as normal, and whilst there is some throttling taking place, the fans in my system are still running faster and noisier than before.

Fan blades are clean, and the same effect isn't noticeable if I boot Windows. I'm basing this entirely on my own perception, but the fans seem to be spinning faster even when idle recently. I'll reiterate, if I boot Windows they are noticeably quieter, which means it's not a hardware issue.

I switched to the ck kernel a few days ago, but this effect has appeared since then, not coinciding with the change. 3 kernel updates since and I can't be certain which update first exhibited this behaviour.

At complete idle the fans eventually settle down, but any kind of load (even playing an mp3) will start it up and it takes a while to settle again, even though the cores remain throttled at 800 Mhz. Does anyone have any idea what may cause this?

For info: Phenom II 965 BE O/C @ 3.6Ghz, Gigabyte M720-US3 MB, MSI Radeon HD4670 1Gb gfx card. I'm pretty sure the noisy fan is one of the MB controlled fans (probably the system fan rather than the CPU fan). Has anyone else noticed unpredictable (or rather undesirable) fan speed behaviour with recent kernels?

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Ryzen 5900X 12 core/24 thread - RTX 3090 FE 24 Gb, Asus B550-F Gaming MB, 128Gb Corsair DDR4, Fractal Design Define 7 XL, 5 HD (2 NvME PCI, 4SSD) + 1 x optical.
Linux user #545703

/ is the root of all problems.

humilleitor

Member

Registered: 2010-02-22

Posts: 46

Re: Fan speed?

Hi. Did you manage to find out what the problem was?

I'm experiencing exactly the same one. In my case, everything started when I bought a new laptop, with faster CPU, etc. I installed, of course, the latest linux version and kernel (3.0), tried different distributions: aptosid, arch, mint, fedora, and in all of them the fans were noisier than when I run Windows on the same laptop. Symptoms are exactly as you describe. For weeks, I've been convinced that there was some issue with the Intel HD graphics card, the core i5 CPU, or even the Sandy Bridge chipset on my new laptop. But then, as a last try, I downgraded to a 2.6 kernel and, lo and behold!, now the fan runs much quieter; as quiet as in my old laptop (with kernel 2.6 as well). So, it definitely is a 3.0 kernel issue (related, or not, with the Sandy Bridge). But I haven't found any information whatsoever when googling the problem. I guess people in general don't care too much about fan noises? But it bothers me a lot, because I usually work under totally silent conditions, and then the fan is quite audible.

Last edited by humilleitor (2012-03-03 01:50:28)