new Asus C90P - fans running hard

I just ordered and received a barebones Asus C90P. Specs on add-ins.

HD: Hitachi 320GB 7200rpm S-ATA 300
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo Wolfdale E8500 3.16 GHz/1333/6MB
RAM: 4GB DDR-2 800 SODIMM (2X2GB)
GPU: GeForce 8600M GT 256MB GDDR3 (700MHz) MXM 2.0
OS: Windows XP Professional SP3.


The system sounds like a jet about to take off when the fans are at high speed, and unfortunately, the fans are almost always running at high speed!!! It feels nice and cool on the bottom, so the cooling is working. It runs on high speed This is when doing something as simple as using explorer to browse files on my hard drive. It will randomly slow down for periods of about 1-5 seconds, other times the fans will slow as long as 30 seconds and then ramp back up.

Is there some control to slow down the fans? The "overclocking" software doesn't work correctly - the supposed "overclocking" and "gaming" options are greyed out. I can only swap between standard mode and power saving mode. In power saving mode, the fans still run on high (the screen dims which shows the mode works in a general sort of way).

Any clues what I have to do to get the fans to calm down and spin at the basic speed most of the time?

 

Heh, most C90S owners want the exact opposite, our fans do not spin enough. There's really nothing you can do short of a hardware mod to control the fans. You can attempt to rewrite the thermal profile in the ACPI script as well, but it's extremely difficult.

If it bothers you that much, I would start by trying to undervolt your CPU and downclock your GPU to try and keep the temperatures cooler, thus hopefully keeping the fans off for you.

 

I can concur that the c90s has no such issue unless you simply did not apply the thermal paste to the cpu or did not remove the paper tab from the heatsink. Unfortunately the c90p is a dead horse and you will find few around that had bought it. We did not even add it to our site.

 

Both heatsinks came with thermal paste pre-applied. Additionally, I pulled plastic covers off of each. The video heat sink also came with pliant foam or rubber pads around the edges. They looked like they were meant to stay in place, so I didn't remove them. However, I did remove the cover over the thermal paste.

Should I open the unit and remove those pads?

 

you removed the aluminum cover on the vga?
what cover are you talking about? pic?

 

Call Asus and send it back to them, the CPU fan control in the motherboard need to re-work.

 

Hey Ken,

You're kidding! You mean Asus actually managed to screw up the C90P motherboards as well? You'd think with all the problems the C90S had at release, the least Asus could have done is fixed them all with the C90P.

Sigh.

 

Stuff happend, **** breaks.

 

I think it's another CPU revision issue so the mainboard rework is required.

When sending it back to Asus, I suggest send it with the CPU so they can do rework with your CPU not using their testing CPU.

Sigh.

 

That happened once on my C90s, and I reached for seatbelts...thought I was gonna pull a few G's....... Hasn't happened in several months since. But I would definitely listen to Ken on this one.