Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

Yes, thanks for the tip. I installed Everest Ultimate, and in the Stability tool, they show all those things including CPU fan speed. Curiously, the CPU temperatures read a few degrees higher than reported in HW Monitor.

The E6400 with Intel graphics is an excellent performer cooling-wise! I ran the stability test with the CPU at 100%, and the fan did not turn on. CPU temps were in the low 50's. In contrast, the E6400 with Nvidia graphics has its fan always at about 2900 rpm. When exercised to 100%, the fan speed increased to 4800 rpm, annoyingly high.

I played a mp4 1080p video, a rip from a Blu-Ray movie. The intel graphics has no trouble with it, and the CPU utilization was low. Again, the fan never turned on. The Nvidia card temperature went up to about 64C when playing the same video. The fan stayed at 2.9K rpm.

I am very impressed with the E6400' cooling design. It is like a passively cooled computer, even when running at 100% CPU utilization. This is good enough to meet HTPC needs.

 

install the latest chipset drivers as well

 

A) there is a 64 bit i8kfangui, and B) that disable driver signing requirement has not worked since well before SP1, and does not work after it.

additionally, you have to pay a few hundred dollars per year for the signing certificate, so that is also completely false.

 

Good to know. Because of John Ratsey commant I thought it did not exist, and when I looked I only found the 32-bit version (I probably skipped the 64-bit) and saw what it does and explained the problem.

Well in any case, my sound card drivers on my desktop are not signed drivers and they installed correctly (X-Fi on Vista 64-bit Ultimate)
And the command provided makes Windows says that the command has been executed successfully.

 

I've installed all the latest drivers from DELL site.
Should I try re-installing?

 

i just got mine from the outlet and i've noticed a flicker while only using the battery. anyways to stop this? thanks.

 

That's normal behaviour: the screen refresh rate becomes slower (40 Hz I think) to use less power.

You can probably turn it off using the Vista power management settings.

 

i think you can disable driver signing....you have to press F8 during startup to access the advanced windows loading options menu. i did this to change my windows mobile device drivers so i could use some modified ones

 

You may have some hardware problem with your Nvidia version, i dont think it is supposed to be that hot. Mine surely isnt.

The GPU is designed to be able to work in high temps and its not the same thing as the whole computer is hot like a fryingpan. And just because the intel graphics doesnt have any GPU temp sensor it doesnt mean its not producing any heat. My E6400 doesnt start the fan unless i stress it, and most of the time when i do i really need the all the power i can get.

 

I turned off virtual memory. But now I noticed the cpu temps are somewhat higher and the fan runs more at higher rpms. is this normal? is it a good idea to turn off virtual memory. I did it to improve my audio DAW performance. I also get sometime a windows message telling me to close some programs because I am running low on memory, but the computer doesn't slow down at all.