Can you prevent fan cycling with fan control?

I'm starting to play around with fan control programs, and I love 'em. I was wondering...I've heard that the L502 can cycle the fan annoyingly (short bursts of fan in frequent intervals while the computer is under light load). Has anyone tried installing fan control software to see if you can replace that annoying cycling with a slow, steady fan speed that cools as well or better? What were the results?

 

excellent question!!! I don't know!

When just doing light web browsing, my l702x 3D goes from silent to noisy to silent to very noisy... annoying! I'd much rather just even-out the heat by having a slow constant fan speed running.

I've quickly tried 'speedfan' as I've used that successfully in the past with HTPC's but cannot see any way that it can control my L702x's fan.

 

You need the most recent beta of speedfan and you need to enable "Dell support" or something like that (it mentions Dell specifically in the option) in the options section for it to work on the l502x and l702x. Then it controls the fan fine. Keeping it lower will raise the temperature of the system though, so watch it!

 

I wouldn't say lower it at all. But I think what happens with cycling is this. It's programmed to idle at, say, 2000 rpm, and when temps get above a certain point, it'll blow at 5000 rpm until the temps drop again (not the L502x's actual fan speeds). Temperature slowly builds to the kick-in point for the 5000 rpm, rapidly drops, and then goes back to silent running.

If you set minimum fan speed to 3500 rpm instead of 2000 rpm, but don't change anything else about fan speed, temps may never get to the point that triggers the 5000 rpm kick-in. So instead of nearly-silent fan with spikes of loud fan noise, you have constant low-but-not-nearly-silent fan noise (which I think we all agree would be much less annoying).

I would never suggest that people control fan noise by lowering the maximum fan speed. But if they raise the minimum fan speed to nip rising temperatures in the bud, it seems to me that could prevent the fan cycling (quiet quiet loud, quiet quiet loud, quiet quiet loud) when the computer is under light load.

 

@Mitlov I haven't tried this yet, but this person modified I8kfanGUI (fan control program) so that it'll work with the XPS models. He also states, however, that the XPS doesn't support custom fan speeds. Haven't confirmed it yet but it would be a bummer if this is true.

 

Setting the XPS power option to Power Saver and enabling Active Cooling in advanced config seems to fix the issue.

 

If you're going to do that, just save yourself $500++ and get a laptop with integrated graphics and the slowest processor you can find.

 

I think he's referring to the method posted by FanNoise=Crazy. Done correctly and you will get rid of the annoying fan issue with no cost in performance.

But I think the OP's question was asking about something else. During light usage the XPS 15 stays quiet for about 5-10 minutes until temps reach high 50s; the fan then starts to spin louder for like 30 seconds to lower the temps, and the cycle starts again. (I think) the OP is looking for a way to eliminate this cycle by finding a way to set the lowest fan speed slightly higher to decrease the equilibrium temperature.

 

Actually, there are some changes that depend only on the selected Power Plan, and not the settings in the power plan (registry tweaks may also work). The most well known being the rapid change of C-States that can cause a high-pitched noise. When Windows 7 is in High Performance mode, the processor doesn't enter the lower-powered states, and doesn't make the noise. No amount of tweaking the minimum and maximum processor states can substitute for selecting the High Performance plan. The system does indeed use more power in this mode (~7 watt difference on my S-XPS 1645), meaning that you may be getting more performance.

Oh yeah, I know about the problem. Many, many Dells have this problem. You can tell Dell about the problem on IdeaStorm: IdeaStorm | Reduce fan noise in laptops (easy & "free" fix)