Latitude E6400/E6500 Owners Fan Noise?

Im wondering how much noise to expect with the e6400 in the dock, dual monitors, with an SSD, X4500MHD, and undervolted P8400? I have music going 90% of the time, but sometimes not.

 

Hey guys,
So if I got an E6500 with the integrated intel graphics, my machine wouldn't be any quieter than one with an nvidia card because the nvidia card has its own cooler?

 

The discrete GPU has its own heatpipe and heatsink, but a single fan pushes air through both the GPU and CPU heatsinks. An E6500 with an integrated GPU will definitely be quieter than an E6500 with a dedicated GPU, but with the NVS160M it shouldn't be by THAT much; the E6500 thermal solution is designed to handle the bigger processors and graphics cards found in the M4400.

 

And hopefully they'll release BIOS A13 for the E6400/E6500 soon - the latest BIOS revision A13 for the M4400 has updated thermal tables - delays the fan by another 10 degrees or so on the GPU temps, and exhibits the same behaviour when docked -

 

I thought I'd give an update as the answers in this thread were what gave me the final push to buy an E6500.

I did a superclean install right off the bat, so I can't comment on the behavior of this machine with the Dell factory preinstall, but on Windows 7 beta I can run my machine for an entire day with casual usage (web browsing, text editing, email, MP3, etc) and the fan NEVER turns on. It's exceeded my expectations.

If I install a new program the fan will turn on very briefly during the install and then turn off either a few seconds or a minute after. I'm guessing this has to do with the CPU maxing out when it uncompresses the files or something. Since I don't install programs often this isn't a problem.

If I watch a youtube video the fan will come on usually in the middle of the video and turn off a minute or so after the video ends. If I watch a DivX/Xvid video or push the machine to a similar level of CPU and graphics usage that's the only time the fan will come on and then stay on. The weird thing though is as soon as my computer gets back to casual levels of use a simple press of Fn+Z will stop the fan immediately and it doesn't come back on until I stress the computer again. Seems like an overly cautious set of fan rules. Good thing there's a Fn+Z trick to override it.

 

my e6400 with integrated video card is sooo quiet....
it only turns on
when i encode avi files to dvd and burn it
when i play world of warcraft
when i play online games
when i play lan games

but on most office apps and internet apps - it doesn't turn on even though my lappie is on 8hrs a day

 

You may find that the fan does come on sometimes but, at the slower speed, you need to be in a quiet room to hear it. I have to use I8kfanGUI to tell me if my fan is running.

John

 

This. Althought im upset than I8kfangui does not work with vista 64.

 

That's the problem of moving to 64-bit: Loss of compatibility with some older software and hardware. Sometimes there are work-arounds.

John

 

I am crying tears of blood now.

This week, i finally kicked my Dell XPS M12010 out of the house, after two years of repeated changes of motherboards and heatsinks (not to mention two destroyed batteries) because of heat problems and fan running all the time.

Now, my Dell Latitude E6400 is having the exact same problem.

I am running Windows Ultimate 64, and a reasonbly high specced machine with the nvidia GPU. I am working as a programmer, so visual studio 2008, spotify, citrix and web browsers are running at the same time.

The fan has been going full speed for several hours now, and I am thinking about ditching dell alltogether.

Is there a temp/fan diagnostics program for Win 7 64?