Fan control: Asus X5DIJ laptop (K50IJ mobo) - help needed please

Hi,

I have an Asus X5DIJ laptop, which has a K50IJ motherboard (or, at least, that's what CPU-Z says) and a T3100 processor. I love this laptop, especially since I replaced its HDD with an SSD and upgraded it to 4GB memory. The only annoyance is its fan - or rather, its silly fan control.

The laptop turns on completely silent and remains so even after Windows 7 is started. But then, as soon as I perform any operation that pushes the CPU a bit (such as, open up Firefox and open a few websites with Flash on them, or start watching a video, start a virus scan etc.) the fan turns on... and it very rarely ever stops again... The funny thing is that the air it blows out is barely (if any!) warmer than room temperature, so I guess that fan should not even be on at that low temperature.

So I installed CoreTemp to monitor the processor temperature. What I found is that the fan control is a bit silly - the fan turns or when any of the two CPU cores reached 35C. Then I left the laptop alone and waited a few minutes. I found that the fan stops only when both CPU core temperatures drop below 25C. I tried twice, both times with the same result. That's quite a low limit, I would say! I don't think that any temperature below 45C would significantly shorten the processor's lifetime...

I found that regular CPU cores temperature is around 30C to 35C for most of the time - even without any fan activity! So it would be wonderful if I could overwrite the default setting somehow to, let's say, tell the laptop to turn on fan only at 42C processor temperature and turn it off at 38C. That would mean that my laptop could be completely silent for 90% of the time! Or manual control, which can be turned on and off, would be great as well, as, for example, when I just read a book on my laptop, or read a long internet article, or watch a non-HD video (<5% processor load), I could safely turn the fan off.

The problem is there is not any temperature/fan-related setting in BIOS. I tried FanSpeed in vain - I could not manage to affect the CPU fan speed at all (FanSpeed works well with my wife's desktop PC, but on my laptop it seems to have no effect whatsoever). Then I tried Asus Fan Xpert only to receive a funny error message during installation saying the software was supporting only Asus motherboards... What could be more Asus than a genuine Asus motherboard in a genuine Asus laptop? Hmm...

So, can you recommend me any (prefarably software) way to gain control the CPU fan speed (or become able to turn it off completely and enable it again when needed)? Did you manage to control CPU fan speed on your Asus laptop? If yes, how did you do it?

Thank you very much for any answers in advance.

 

Since all these ECs are written custom for the system and in very base code it can be very hard to write to them properly.

 

Follow the quoted instructions and I'll see what can be done

 

Hi, thank you - yes, please look into it, here is the zip file that contains both the bin file and the screenshot: DSDT.zip

 

You can use NBFC with Asus Zenbook UX31A profile to control your fan! Get NBFC and use it with Asus Zenbook UX31A config from HERE and you should be good to go.

Let me know how it works. If it messes up your fans (which is a possibility) then do a full shutdown, wait 10 seconds and turn it back on.

 

Yes it works! You are a star! Thank you very much!
There is a quite strange thing though. When leaving the laptop alone, or just do some low-CPU-usage job (e.g. reading and eBook) the CPU temperature is between 30C and 35C regardless whether the fan is on or off. I set the limits that way it should not turn the fan on until 50C. However, no matter what I set (i.e. limits, turn auto fan control on or off), every 90 seconds it turns on the fan at approx 20% rpm for 10 seconds and then turns it off - and repeats this every 90 seconds forever (despite the CPU temp is a constant 30C-35C). So now my laptop is silent for 80 seconds out of every 90 seconds. Is there a way to eliminate this 10 seconds turning on?

 

Hi,
I played a bit more with this, and I learnt that the 90 seconds was just a coincidence. In fact, the fan turns on whenever it the CPU temperature reaches 34 degrees. I so there is a "fake temperature" option in NotebookFanControl. Could you please tell me the settings I could use to fake the temperature? That would probably eliminate the problem.
Thank you

 

In the meantime I noticed that every temperature monitor application displays a different temperature at the same time - ranging from 34 to 42 degrees...

Any idea about the "fake temperature" option? I would need the register number. Unfortunately NoteBookFanControl's help does not really say how to find that out. Without that I cannot use the function. Or alternatively, if anybody has any good idea how to prevent the fan from turning on that very low temperature, please let me know. (As I wrote before I can control NoteBookFanControl to control the fan speed, even stop the fan, but each time the temperature reaches 34C, it turns on anyway.)

 

I am not entirely sure why it ranges from 34 to 42 degrees, but if that happens only when NBFC is running then my guess would be because NBFC writes specified temperature to the Embedded Controller to keep the fan quiet and what happens is that different programs read temperature from EC at different times and some of them get the "real" value vs. others get it after NBFC overwrote it.

Open NBFC configuration file that you're using in Notepad and find the following at the end of the file

HTML:

  <RegisterWriteRequests>
    <RegisterWriteRequest>
      <WriteMode>Set</WriteMode>
      <Register>160</Register>
      <Value>45</Value>
    </RegisterWriteRequest>
    <RegisterWriteRequest>
      <WriteMode>Set</WriteMode>
      <Register>166</Register>
      <Value>45</Value>
    </RegisterWriteRequest>
  </RegisterWriteRequests>

Try changing the 45 to 30 or 35 and see what happens.

The register 160 or 0xA0 and 166 or 0xA6 in Embedded Controller are CPU temperature. AFAIK, EC firmware reads those registers to know which temperature CPU is at and controls the fan accordingly. On UX31A the fan turns on past 45C, that's why NBFC writes 45C to keep the fans quiet.

You might want to read this post for more info.

 

No, it happens without NBFC too. For example, while watching a video I turned on a few applications that measure system temperature. The following readings were done at the very same moment:
CoreTemp: Core 0 34C, Core 1 36C
SpeedFan: Core 0 29C, core 1 30C, Temp 1 46C (I have no idea what Temp 1 is, but it seems unlikely that anything would be warmer than the CPU cores...)
Then I turned on NBFC and made another reading, again, all at the very same moment:
CoreTemp: Core 0 34C, Core 1 35C
SpeedFan: Core 0 29C, Core 1 30C, Temp 1 45C
NBFC: CPU Temperature 31C
I can't even imagine why three different programs show three different temperatures at the very same time... (Room temperature was 22.7C at the time of measuring, and the notebook was on top of a wooden desk).

Thank you, I tried. Well, it works one way only, unfortunately. If I enter values less then 45 (I tried 40, 35, 30, 20 and even 0) then there is no change - the fan can be turned off, but whenever the temperature (measured by NBFC) reaches 34C, the fan turns on, just like before. But if I enter values larger than 45 (I tried 55 and 70) then the fan will always be on (unlike before), even if CPU temperature is only 26C... So this does work, but unfortunately one way only. (In the meantime I noticed, that when the fan turns on at 34C for a second or two the "Target fan speed" and The "Current fan speed" values of NBFC turn from 0% to "BIOS controlled" and the fan revs up, and then turn back to 0% and the fan starts to slow down and in approx 10 seconds it stops.)

I have a gut feeling that there is some kind of "hard-wired" BIOS procedure that turns on fan at 34C no matter what. I suspect this even more because this laptop is one of the "Ice Cool"-technology series. It says "Asus X5DIJ ... Self-cooling 'ice-cool' mechanism which assists the laptop in remaining cool even after long periods of use". Also, here ASUS it says about it too, and I guess maybe it is not just the design of the motherboard but it has to do something with BIOS as well. Just guessing of course. But the fact that with NBFC I can achieve any fan speed from 0% to 100% regardless the CPU temperature, but at 34C it changes to "BIOS controlled" and fan turns on, and that probably indicates some kind of "hard-wiring"... ((Otherwise it is a quite cool laptop anyway, one of the coolest I've seen (except of course the ultra-low-energy-consumption-processor-equipped netbooks) i.e. idle temperature with fan on at 12.5% is around 28C while with fan off it is around 34C, and even when pressing the CPU cores at 100% with Orthos's small FFTs test it does not go above 65C - and even then the fan is still far from 100%!))

Maybe we could fool this feature/produre/program, or whatever it is, by supplying false (lower than actual) temperatures to it? Can we do that? I guess if we could somehow manage to falsify the temperature by 5C down, or perhaps 10C down, then it would solve all the problems. (I actually also tried to enter register number 160 into the "Fake Temperatures" tab as well (after trying what you recommended, of course), and played with the values, but nothing happened, the temperatures remained the same in all three programs). Can you help me with altering the temperature values somehow?

 

Just a side question... Which is actually better for the CPU fan in terms of lifetime?
A) If the fan is constantly on.
B) If the fan turns on and off every minute or so.
?

 

There isn't really a way except overwriting them in Embedded Controller memory which is what NBFC is doing.

I really don't know, but my guess would be A. I don't think it will matter for the lifetime for your computer anyway. In the worst case, you can always get a new fan on ebay for like $15.

 

Thank you for the answers. Do you know what could be the reason that the Embedded Controller overwriting seems to have effect one way only? (i.e. I can decrease the temperature setting at which the fan comes on, but I cannot increase it.)

 

Any other idea how to prevent the fan turning on at 34C? Anybody?