Fan always enabled on Aspire 5102

Hello everyone,

I just bought myself a brand new Acer aspire 5102. Everything is looking fine, except that my fan keeps blowing al the time. Not at the highest speed, but still on a level that is pretty loud.

It's not that my cpu is running hot (around 40°C) or that i'm doing lots of things. I'm talking about the laptop when it's idle.

I did some research and some were saying there was an option "fan always enabled" in the bios or in the eSettings, but I can't see such an option on my computer.

The only moment that the fan is quiet, is when I wake the laptop from standby. Then it's quiet for about 20 seconds. Then the blowing continues, although the cpu-temp is not rising much. Also, the laptop never feels very hot.

EDIT: I upgraded my BIOS to 3.05... no luck however

Any suggestions to solve my problem? Thanks in advance!

 

apparently acer have removed the fan always on option from the newer versions of eSettings management. you could try updating the AMD cpu driver or making sure that the power profile is set to laptop/mobile as you may have overlooked this.

 

As hairy pointed out to you eSettings no longer allows for fan control and the Bios doesn't allow it either.

With the 5102 there was never a way to control the CPU fan, personally I'd rather have it on all the time at a very slow speed that coming on and going off every few seconds. Having it running all the time stops temperature spikes and along with undervolting keeps my notebook very cool. The fan does go off however but the CPU temp has to be around 29c for this to happen. It only happened to me once when I was in a very cold room this also explains why when you first turn it on the fan is off because the CPU temps are very low at startup. You will get used to them being on I hardly ever notice it now.

 

Hmm, so it's considered to be normal.? I'm affraid that I'll not get used to it that easy

 

it sounds like your machine isn't getting anough airflow, thats the only reason i can think that it would be doing that.

 

From what i'm reading on the internet, it's more a sort of misconfiguration. Like it's turning on the fan one or two temperature levels to early. Some are proposing a tool called Notebook Hardware Control in order to change these acpi-settings, but with my 64bit version of Windows Vista, I'm unfortunately not able to run it...

All alternatives are still very welcome

 

Did some further testing.

when cpu0 reaches 36°C, the fan is suspended. When temperature reaches around 45°C, it comes on again. So, it's when there's no cpu load, it will blow for 3 minutes, then it's quiet for about 2 minutes and so on...

But while i'm browsing the internet, it nevers stops blowing.

 

Called acer support. The guy was telling me that 40°C is too hot ??? He gave me a UPS label to have pc picked up for repair.

I don't understand. From everything I read on the forum, this seems to me a pretty normal temperature...

 

Does that tech support guy think you live in a freezer!! My 5102 idles at around 38-39c and I have it undervolted, so how did he reason that 40c is too hot. Most mobile CPUs idle around that temperature range. Now if the temperature was say 50c+ on idle then yeah that would be too high. I hope acer doesn't take your notebook and screw it up trying to fix something that AFAIK is the norm . My advice is to every now and then take the thermal panel(biggest panel) off the bottom of the notebook and clean the fan blades as well as remove any debris from the vents.

Interesting you noted that the fan goes off when core0 36c that sounds about right. But as I said in my previous post my fan goes down to a very low speed when I am surfing the internet (I can barely hear it) and it will go off completely when the CPU temps go below 30c, but that only happens in a air conditioned very cold room. You aren't the only person to complain about the fan in the 5102 never going off, users on this forum and others that I read say the same thing so I figure it is how the cooling system is designed.

 

I was suprised by that statement of the tech support guy too. But my fan is going all the time on a noise level that is pretty loud. It's disrupting when I'm in a meeting, for example. And in the review of notebookreview.com, the reviewer is stating that this laptop is very quiet... That's exactly what I want, but not getting.
I'll keep you guys informed about the further process.

 

Actually, the fan does stop when the cpu reaches 30* Celcius. My undervolted cpu does get to that stage even when running at full speed.

So it doesn't run all the time, it just has a really really cool shut off point, something that will be hard to reach w/o undervolting.

My other Acer had a shut off point of 45*, this one is just set much lower than that.

 

my system idles at 53C!!! oh well mine is going to acer support any way for a messed up web cam.

 

From what I read, Acer lowered the turn off point of the fan in a BIOS update almost a year ago... Why the **** would they do that?

The review of notebookreview was positive about the quietness of this pc: "Most of the time, the fan is off, and like with the Aspire 5672, you can hear the hard drive". Why can't they just make it back like in the goold old days? I want a laptop, not a hairdryer

 

Are you serious that you wanted the old setup back?

My old Acer's fan would go on at high speed for 20 seconds, then completely off for 20 seconds. Then back on to high speed for 20 seconds, and then off again for 20 seconds. That got REALLY annoying very very fast.

I'd take a very low humm 24/7 and a cool laptop, than complete quiteness for 20 seconds then a jet engine for 20 seconds.

Btw, if your 5102 fan on low sounds like a hairdryer, then you got problems.

Also, you want a laptop w/o the sounds of a fan? Well my friend, you're in the wrong market. It's like saying "I want a house, not a mortgage". Sorry, but unless you get a very low powered ULV processor, you can't have 1 without the other.

 

My former laptop was a P4, though the fan only blew every quarter. And when I was doing light weight jobs, it almost never turned on. So with a mobile processor I'd expect at least the same performance on this level than from a 4 year old machine.

I certainly hope that there's something wrong with my Acer, as my desktop pc produces less noise (ok, it has a zalman fan).

I'll keep my breath and wait for it to arrive

 

i dont know it seems kind of silly, the only thing i can think of is that the unit sucks in more dust and therefore clogs the heatsink quicker when the fan is always running at full speed

 

Hi guys, here's an update on my sitation. I got my laptop back from acer repair. As expected, they didn't find any problem and said that the fan is functioning normal. They did repair a death pixel on the left border of my screen though, so it wasn't a complete waste of time

However, I keep finding this fan behaviour a little bit strange. I've had a lot of Acer laptops in my hands, but none of them had a fan that started blowing at around 35°C... I guess I can only wait for a piece of software to control my fan, that works with acer and Windows x64;

 

Most likely the only thing that will sort this issue out is a new BIOS, but like I said it doesn't bother me. As I told you that service tech that said your temps at 40c were too high was crazy!

 

"Fan always enabled" option can be found on older version of eSetting.
However, disable this option does not turn off the CPU fan, just make CPU fan change speed dynamically.

 

It has always seemed the laptop is too noisy while using Windows (even though Acer power management utilities are working there). I use Linux most of the time and hear the fan very randomly.

Have you tried to put the CPU in its lowest configuration through Acer utilities? That could quiet & slow down the thing.

Joe.

 

Yes I tried that and the Fan is working a little bit less, but still more than necessary. It's just blowing cold air.

The reason that you got the fan blowing less in Linux, is probably due to the different ACPI-drivers. I read on some forums how you can manually edit the trip points of the fan in Linux... But i don't understand everything

 

Surely ACPI drivers are better, and at least in my case I don't need to be tinkering around with Ubuntu 7.04 because it automatically sets the processor to an 'on demand' scheme, so only when necessary it runs at full speed, most of the time at half of it. This way the system manages to stay at a relatively cool temperature of 37-40°C most of the time (very nice for a dual core processor), besides battery lasts more (about 25 minutes more than in Windows).

Joe.