Unplugged fan on Dell v13

It may not be the thermal paste. There is a wide variation in the actual power consumption of CPUs which have the same nominal power rating. Maybe the OP struck lucky and got a power efficient CPU. Personally I would be worried about disabling the fan completely but perhaps, in this case, the thermal assembly is doing a good enough job of dissipating a moderate amount of heat.

John

 

Good idea. I consider also to unplug the fun on my Latitude D630, the temperatures can as high as 95-100C on both CPU and GPU part. I'll make sure it won't go above 100C under load...

 

At 100C the CPU the CPU must be close to having problems or shutting down (I can't remember if thermal protection is built into that generation of CPUs) and disconnecting the fan must increase the likelihood of that happening. First you should clean out the cooling system (see the photo in this thread) and also following the undervolting guide. These measures should reduce the fan activity although undervolting won't fix a hot Nvidia GPU.

John

 

Thermal protection is included since Pentium 4 age, so I do not have to worry about that. I have already upgraded the cooling system (cooper pad on GPU, plastic grill cut out of the back) so there is no further step. The undervolting guide is good idea, but for some reason RMclock does not willing to run under Win7 X64.

 

You need the signed 64 bit rtcore.sys. There's a link to it near the end of the first post in the undervolting guide. This works on my E4300 with Win7-64 although I also have to instruct UAC to let the program run each time I start Windows (not very often because I hibernate between sessions).

John

 

1) I personally don't feel that it's safe to disconnect the fan unless you can run passively at full load without your temps getting dangerously high. "Dangerously high" is obviously subjective, but around 60C to 70C is my limit.

2) If you want to control the fan on a D630, why not use i8kfangui? You can keep the fan off at idle and low loads and it's so much safer at full load. Of course if i8kfangui also doesn't work under 64bit 7, I suppose it can't be helped.

Either way, if I had the choice, I'd definitely go software fan control over a hardware "mod" such as pulling the fan.

 

Thank you for the advices! I've done undervolting my CPU and the results are pretty impressive. The load (max) temperature went down by 14C, from 84 to 70C. The Idle temperature also cooler, so hopefully fan won't run that so often. I will see.

 

That's a nice reduction. However, you should run an overnight test under full CPU load just to confirm that your new voltage settings are safe for long-term use.

John

 

trying out undervolting as well. thanks