My ASUS Fan Experiment

There have been lots of stories/complaints about ASUS notebooks and cpu temp, speed and fan control. So I thought I would put my M6Ne to the test and see how it goes.
Ok so my first test is simple. I sit and watch the cpu speed and temp and time how long and when the fan kicks in. In ac mode game power4gear settings and idle conditions, ie cpu is at 600, and nothing is running (bar ASUS probe, CPU-z) the temp stays fairly constant at betw 44-50C. The fan remains off. When temp gets over 50C for more than 15sec constantly. the fan will kick in at 3000rpm. It will then stay on until cpu temp gets to 44C, and will turn off. This takes around 1-1:30min. Putting the cpu under stress by simply opening a program ie musicmatch 9, causes temp to rise quickly to above 50-55, and fan kicks in at same time. Again it won't turn off untill it reaches 44C.

Test 2 was to see if fan would turn off while in high or super performace modes. In both of these modes the CPU is maxed out and stays at 1700 constantly, even if nothing is running.
Unfortunately it is quite hot here in brisvagas (35+) and puting the lappie into either of these modes resulted in a temp rising to above 50. The fan would then kick in after ~15sec and remain on as the temp would not go below 50 let alone 44 (average~53).
So I put the notebook in the fridge!



It took around 5-10min to get the CPU down to below 45C but when it did the fan turned off. CPU temp still rose above 50 and fan did come back on, suggesting that even though the lappy was in cold 4C environment it still wasn't enough to keep the cpu cold enough when its running at full speed. Also it took 30-45sec for the fan to kick in once temp had gone above 50C. But essentially the fan operated the same way regardless of power4gear setting while in a/c mode.

Battery mode is a slightly different beast. Here cpu speed is always throttled down when the notebook is idle. The difference is that settings like battery saving & cd audio keep cpu at 600 constantly, while high performace & game allows the cpu to go back upto 1700 when needed. DVD mode caps at 1200 along with presentation and email/office.

I expected to see similar results as I saw with a/c but it wasn't quite the case. My first test was to see if the fan would come on in battery mode.
To get temps above 50 I ran adaware SE which uses the cpu quite a bit 90%+ in this power mode. Temp rose to 52-53 C and remained there for the 5min the scan took, the fan did NOT come on at all during this time. I switched to High performace restarted scan and temp rose straight away to 54C and fan kicked at the same time.
In DVD mode the fan kicked in at 54-55C, thus perhaps the trigger temp is actually 54-55C. In a/c mode it was difficult to pin point the exact temp as the temp would rise quickly, ASUS probe is delayed slightly 5sec poll interval, and fan would come on all in the space of 5-15secs. I went back and did some testing under ac game mode, and I believe the trigger temp is 54-55C as this is when the fan was coming on.

So in summary, from my tests power4gear doesn't effect fan speed at all, but it does effect cpu speed, inturn determining how much heat the cpu produces. The fan kicks in at 54-55C and will remain on until temp reaches 44C.

I hope this helps some and whould be interested to see others results from similar experiments. Must go now as wife is complaining that I spend to much time mucking around on the computer...don't know where she gets that idea from lol
a



ASUS M6Ne 15.4" WSXGA 1.7 PM ATI9700 80Gb HDD 512Mb RAM

 

Interesting experiment- I like the Lappie in the fridge trick. Is that dinner in the bowl under the Lappie?


M5200N - fan runs all the time - though it is reasonably quiet.

At CPU 33C fan is 1200rpm (airconditioned room in hot hot Brisvegas day - didn't do the fridge trick)at 40C 1400 and starts to climb to 2400 at 55C.

No recognisable difference between AC and battery mode.

 

Hi Underpantman,

We certainly appreciate the time you take to perform these tests. The overall behavior of the notebook and power management is actually quite straightforward to understand with a computer engineering background and some knowledge about how Windows works.

Power4 Gear+ has obviously no effect on the fan directly. This utility monitors the CPU load and adjusts the CPU frequency accordingly, this is all it does. As the consequence, less heat is generated, and then, as a consequence of less heat being generated, the fan stays off more often.

The logic (software) that reads the temperature from the sensors on the motherboard and then kicks the fan is the BIOS of the notebook. Such a program has no reason to be implemented as a regular application, because this application could crash, and as a result of the heat not being dissipated, the notebook could be damaged.

This is typically a BIOS function.

On the net you will find some very rare programs that can control the fan of very specific notebooks from Sony, Toshiba or Dell laptops. These programs use private BIOS functions, are not supported and, if used incorrectly or with the wrong notebook, can damage your computer.

 

How do you guys manage to keep Power4 Gear+ installed?

Under AC mode, don't you think SpeedswitchXP or even Windows XP alone (in Laptop PM mode) do a better job?

Last time I used Power4 Gear, fan was on for 35 seconds, then off for 10, then on again for 35 etc. regardless of what I was doing.

 

Escape, your completly right the fans are controlled by the bios, its just that a few posts by others suggested that the problems were with power4gear, so I felt I should respond to those questions, and show that power4gear or any other software was NOT to blame. As for why I still use power4gear and why did I do the experiment with it, I guess cause the average user (inc myself) just wants to buy a lappie and have it work, without having to mod & customise it to much. I also like being able to use the power mode button to switch betw settings, very handy for me. To be honest untill others started reporting fan issues, I hadn't even noticed mine turning on/off, as I nearly always have music playing when I work. I guess I'm just not that concerned about it, as long as the CPU doesn't fry I'm happy, but I understand that everyone is different and has different expectations as to what is exceptable.
Personally I think most of the problems with fans are due to hardware faults, and not bios issues. If it was bios then everyone would be having similar problems. Also ASUS are one of the top if not the top m/b manurfacture in the world, you would expect that to get there they would have had to refined and make their bios top notch and super stable.
For eg in support my theory of hardware faults, some users have reported that the use of quality thermal grease solved there issues, suggesting some problems maybe due to a poor/missaligned connection between heatsink and cpu.
Hopefully as more reports/experiments from users with issues get posted the real source of these problems will be identified, at the moment were all still guessing.
Thanks for the feedback
a



ASUS M6Ne 15.4" WSXGA 1.7 PM ATI9700 80Gb HDD 512Mb RAM

 

I understand perfectly well that Power4Gear is not responsible for the problems I've seen.

Most of the time my M6Ne behaves correctly, the way you describe above. But several times while pugged in to AC power I've closed the lid and heard the fan kick on full speed - 4000rpm. It never turned itself off, and Asus Probe/MobileMeter showed the CPU temp had dropped to 35C already. The only fix for this was to shutdown/cycle power.

Not that it was a huge problem. The fan noise was the biggest annoyance, and I suppose the fan may wear out prematurely because of this behavior, but certainly the system was in no danger of overheating...

By the way, evan after flashing to the current 205 BIOS I've seen this problem occur again. So there's still something flaky here...

old: Sony PCG-GR300P 1.13GHz PIII-M, 512MB
new: Asus M6Ne 2.00GHz P-M, 2GB

 

Hi highlandsun,

Thank you very much for your contribution to this fan discussion. Hyde, I hope you are reading this.

Yet another user concerned by fan problems, this noisy fan that drives us nuts when it is constantly running.

Underpantman, please note that the A2D fan might be significantly noisier than the fan of your notebook. With the post of highlandsun, you know now that this problem may concern M6Ne users as well. Including you! If you can, switch your music off and try to pay attention to the fan.

I don't believe this is a hardware problem. It would be a hardware problem to switch the fan OFF? No way. If that was a hardware problem the problem would certainly remain after a reboot.

 

After spending all weekend listen to my fan I'm pretty sure I have a handle on how it works. I went into the test with and open mind, if anything I was kinda hoping to find a fault so I could actively help find a soloution. However mine is fine. I'm not just saying that to annoy people, I'm just not getting the problems that others are reporting...lucky me I guess! That doesn't mean that those problems don't exist, or that I don't think they are important, just the opposite. I also didn't mean to assume everyone was stupid by mentioning the power4gear issue. I was just trying to keep things as basic as possible thus allowing as many novices access to the discussion.
I guess what I was trying to say was that the various problems that people are having, eg fan not turning on, or off, temp to high or too low, could be caused by a number of different faults some of which could be hardware and some bios. Personally I'm betting hardware, I could be wrong, time will tell. Maybe I'm just playing devils advocate here I don't know...maybe I'm taking out my ass???? Hopefully more discussion will help, maybe I'll have to eat some toilet paper??
a




ASUS M6Ne 15.4" WSXGA 1.7 PM ATI9700 80Gb HDD 512Mb RAM

 

I have a Asus A2D and my main complaint is the annoying way the fan noisily kicks in for a while every few minutes while watching a DVD. is there a way of running it constantly but slower?

 

Some new info on my observations - I noted that sometimes the fan kicks up to full speed (4000rpm) even though the temperature is below 45C. Just as an experiment, while this was happening I toggled PowerGear up to Super Performance mode and watched the CPU temperature climb up. When it 49C, the fan speed *dropped* and it behaved normally after that.

Something is very flaky in the ACPI implementation, but at least now I have a workaround.

old: Sony PCG-GR300P 1.13GHz PIII-M, 512MB
new: Asus M6Ne 2.00GHz P-M, 2GB