Speedfan works for the W2V - quiet fan forever!

Lucky reported in this thread here that Speedfan could detect the ADT7463 chip in the W2V, and therefore enable control of the fan. But neither he nor anyone else has managed to duplicate his initial success. However, I now have the pleasure of reporting that the ADT7463 chip is consistently detected by Speedfan on my W2V when Everest home edition is running in the background. Apparently Everest loads drivers which enables detection of the chip. Link to Everest here. Once Speedfan has found the ADT7463 chip, you can exit from Everest. No need to have it constantly running.

This means that using a combination of Everest HE, Centrino hardware control and Speedfan, we now have complete control of CPU speeds, CPU voltages and fan speeds. And as I show below, the Centrino processor is easily cooled, so your W2V should be able to run very quiet in most cases.

I have exchanged e-mails with Alfredo (the author of Speedfan) about this. He suspects that it should be an easy fix to get Speedfan to detect the ADT7463 without Everest, so there's hope that it will work in an upcoming version.

Speedfan detects a number of temperatures, of which four are active: CPU, HD0 (hard disk), Local and Remote2. I agree with Lucky that Local is almost certainly the motherboard. Interpret it a sort of overall heat of the system. Remote2 is definitely the GPU. It strongly correlates with 3D graphics use and only weakly with CPU and Local temperatures.

The standard BIOS-controlled fan runs at almost constant speed under most use, usually 60-70% (unless 3D graphics are displayed, more on this below). With standard CPU voltage and 100% CPU usage, CPU temperature stabilizes at about 62 C. Assuming that Asus engineers know what they're doing, I therefore take 62 C to be a safe maximum operating temperature of the CPU.

In the following table are stabilized CPU temperatures as a function of fan speed, CPU clock frequency and CPU usage, using an *undervolted* CPU. Fan speeds were all set manually with Speedfan. The 100% CPU usage was obtained by the "full CPU stability check" in Centrino hardware control. CPU usage of 3% seems to be average "idle" usage on my system. All temperatures were recorded on a well warmed-up W2V. You will notice that I have the 1.87 GHz version of the W2V, results may be different with faster processors.

Code:

Stabilized CPU temperatures - undervolted CPU (1.87 GHz at 0.988 V, 800 MHz at 0.700 V)

			800 Mhz		800 Mhz		1.87 Ghz	1.87 Ghz
			CPU 3%		CPU 100%	CPU 3%		CPU 100%

fan off			60 C (*)	64 C (*)	65 C (*)	no (>65 C)		
fan speed 10%		44 C		46 C		52 C		64 C (*)		
fan speed 25%		41 C		44 C		46 C		53 C			
fan speed 40%		41 C		43 C		45 C		52 C			
fan speed 60%		40 C		42 C		44 C		51 C			
fan speed 100%		40 C		40 C		42 C		49 C	

(*) = not quite stable yet, but increases are very slow

Note that even at max performance and 100% CPU usage, fan speeds never have to exceed 10-25% to fully cool the W2V!! Trust me, the fan runs *much* more quiet at 25% than 60-70%, just a low hum from the motor, no whooshing noise. And at 10% it is virtually silent. This shows clearly how impressive a processor Centrino is. It even seems possible to have the fan completely off most of the time at 800 MHz, although occasional (short) fan cooling periods may be necessary. For example, when idle at 800 MHz, CPU increased from 42 to 60 C in 30 minutes. After 5 minutes of cooling at 40% fan speed, CPU was at 46 C.

However, running the CPU at 100% isn't the toughest heat stress the W2V can be subjected to. Running the *GPU* at 100% (e.g. when gaming) is much worse. Indeed, BIOS-controlled fan speeds seem to be directly determined by GPU temperature, not CPU temperature as may be expected. CPU temperature does affect fan speeds slightly, but only indirectly by heat spillover from the CPU to the GPU. Here is a simple formula that fairly well captures how BIOS heat control works: fan speed (in %) = reported GPU temperature (C) + 7.

By the way, reported GPU temperature (Remote2) seems too high. It idles around 70-75 C and reaches 90-95 C when gaming. Speedfan can correct for this if the reporting error is known. An indication of the error is given by the following: immediately after a cold start, both CPU and motherboard temperatures are around 30-33 C, but GPU is reported around 40-45 C. But does this mean that reported GPU is always 10-12 degrees too high, or that it is always 33% (40/30) too high? Or perhaps something else? I don't know. Informed speculation is welcome.

Oops, got a bit sidetracked. I was going to show results for gaming. The following results were obtained using 3Dmark2005 game test 2 looped 10 times, with CPU at maximum performance (1.87 GHz).

Code:

							CPU/GPU temperature (as reported by Speedfan)

Standard CPU voltage (1.308 V), fan speed 100%		61/94 C
Undervolted (0.988 V), fan speed 100 %			50/91 C
Undervolted (0.988 V), fan speed 75 %			52/94 C
Undervolted (0.988 V), fan speed 60 %			53/96 C
Undervolted (0.988 V), fan speed 40 %			56/100 C

The BIOS seems to run the fan at 100% when gaming. These results indicate that the undervolted W2V can probably run safely at 60% fan speed when gaming. It seems Intel has a significant lead over ATI when it comes to chip performance without excessive heat. Either that, or CPUs are easier to design for speed and low power than GPUs (which I doubt).

For people who want to try gaming with lower fan speeds, Centrino hardware control offers the possibility to underclock the GPU. This would be interesting to test, but I haven't done so yet.

For what it's worth, here is a summary of the settings I'm currently using. This is not a recommendation - I'm still experimenting. But I regard these settings as quite conservative.

CPU - desired 55, warning 60
HD0 - desired 40, warning 50
Local - desired 55, warning 60
Remote2 - desired 80, warning 95

Fan Speed04 - minimum 0, maximum 25
(This means that the fan can't run faster than 25% under normal use. However, if a temperature hits a warning level, Speedfan runs the fan at 100%.)


Finally, I have noticed a few problems with Speedfan:

* Reported fan RPM jumps irregularly, even when fan speed is obviously constant. Either sensor error or a bug in Speedfan.

* Fan speed (in %) on Speedfan's Readings tab can be incorrect. This is especially the case immediately after a cold start. Go to Configure and return to refresh it. You might have to do this twice, for some reason.

* Cycling of fan speeds around the goal temperatures - automatic fan control is not smart enough to find a good constant speed. I hope Alfredo can improve Speedfan in this respect.

As always with this kind of tweaking, your mileage may vary, use at your own risk, etc. I think the system is smart enough to shut itself off when there is risk of damage from overheating, but don't take my word for it. Always monitor temperatures actively when you change fan settings!

Now, if only Asus would make the sound quality of this so-called "digital media home" halfway acceptable ...

 

That's awesome news for W2v owners out there who have been complaining about fan noise. Great find and a great post nicke2323

:asus:

 

Thankssssssssssssssssssss!!!!

Now I'm test this right now...

Thanks, thanks, thanks,...

Now, you could send a report of the SMBus to the Speedfan author so he could find a solution to control the fan without having to load Everest utilities

ED: I didn't read you've already contacted SpeedFan's author but I'm happy that he thinks he could find a solution.

 

Ah, Nicke, you beat me to it! I recently stumbled across a thread about W3V fan noise, where DownByFive described this trick, and I haven't had the time to make a detailed post yet..

By the way, you don't have to keep running Everest all the time - just running once and exiting from it right away will do too..

 

Same for me: I found yesterday that the Everest trick was explained by Coriolis in its The ASUS Notebook FAQ sticky (under "2f. Undervolting?")...

 

Thanks Nicke2323. Excellent news and thanks for all the technical information too. Like you say if we could just get this **** sound issue sorted everything would be great.

Phil
W2Vc-U005P

 

nicke2323 great work!!!!!! Very useful trick!

But i have a questions.
As i know X700 hasn't a temperature sensor. I have read this to some other forums for Ati from Ray Adams who is the author of Ati Tray Tools (spesialist for Ati video cards). That's why to make Ati Tray Tools work you must disable the temperature sensons. Search it and you will find that i am right about this information.

So i think that Remote 2 isn't the temperature of X700.
What do you think about that?

 

That makes sense as I actually did use Everest on a couple occasions! I never figured (nor probably would ever) that this could be the reason why it got detected. Nice one!

 

After using Speedfan for a few days just to keep an eye on temps and work out settings etc I can confirm that my remote 2 (GPU?) temp stays around the same as the CPU. They both top out at around 60C after a big session in HL2 and seem to stay at roughly the same tempreture generally. I'll try some CPU intesive tests to see if that brings up the CPU temp on it's own.

Phil
W2Vc-U005P

 

@Hyper:

Strange. On my system, remote2 is totally correlated with graphics use. No question about it.

@philip:

Strange again. My remote2 always hits (at least) 90C when gaming. I wonder if there is some difference between my W2V and everybody else's? I'll check my BIOS version.

 

so basically if that is possible... do we have to repeat the process every time, I mean do we have to run speedfan every time, there is any way to do it automatically? this fan is driving me crazy! W2v :noisyfan:

edit: if I run speedfun (automatic to cpu temp) is that safe?

edit2: how I do set speedfan to start with the settings I want everytime I boot

augi

 

Hi, any new updates, I noticed that the new version of speedFan now works without having to load Everest

 

WICKED WORK~!!! Too bad there's no cure for high temps of GPU, as I have no problems with fan noise from my CPU on my Z70Va. Oh well.

Wish I could mod my GPU cooling system. *sigh*

Cheers,
Mike