Has anyone resolved the intermittent fan on the xps 15?

I know that it has been a prevailing issue but I was wondering if there was a permanent fix to the fan randomly turning on.

 

If you're talking about the fan turning on and off every other second (drove me nuts the first couple of days I had this thing, found a fix right away), there's a work around. I uninstalled the Nvidia graphics driver that Dell supplied and downloaded the latest driver from the Nvidia website. Ever since, the fan does come on but it doesn't do that cycling every other second. Now it comes on every minute or so and stays on longer, and at a lower speed like a normal laptop should. Hope this helps!

 

I did that but the problem persists.

I think you admitted to it too if I'm not mistaken.

There might be a workaround under the power options, namely tweaking with the system cooling policy under advanced settings.

What's everyone's power option settings? I have mine on the dell option right now.

 

I had the problem for a couple of days last summer when I got the laptop, but it isn't really a problem any more. I'm running the latest beta driver from nvidia, though. Version 290.53 I believe. I'm on Balanced, too.

 

I noticed that 290.53 is a beta driver. I assume it is ok to install it? I have 285 right now.

 

I've been running beta drivers ever since the release of Battlefield 3 and haven't had any trouble. I'd say yes. From what I remember though, I uninstalled the previous graphics driver that came pre-installed completely before doing a clean install of the Nvidia driver.

 

Thank you very much. I did just as you did and the fan still comes on sporadically. I even changed the cooling setting to passive when both plugged in and when on battery. I guess this is normal of the fan?

Also are you mostly on your nvidia card or the intel hd one? I'm switching between the two (nvidia for games obviously and the times I'm plugged in). Maybe that influences the fan.

 

The program "Speedfan" does seem to be able to control the fan to a certain extent, and when I want my fan to run silent I have it on a ramping scale that never actually turns the fan off, which also means epic-cold tempratures. However, this solution is very flawed in that support breaks down whenever the BIOS' fan control kicks in, and Speedfan causes porblems with audio playback.
Other solutions (in order of difficulty)
get a notebook cooler
try CapitanKasar's undervolted BIOS's
do a cpu/gpu repaste.
deep down, I think the root problem is in the way that Dell manages the fan, which I believe works as such
40-50 C fan off
50-55 fan low (silent)
the instant it hits 60 C ramp up to 70-ish percent (or 100% of what speedfan can do)
Because it ramps up severely at 60 C, and thus drops under 60 a second later, the fan oscillates up and down infuriatingly
I say 70 because when most of the sensors hit 90 i think the fan goes into overdrive and sounds like a jet engine taking off (this has not happened since the repaste because temps have not gotten that high)
Only a smoother ramping system, a "never-off" fan, or giving fan control to the user could truly fix this problem (if I were in charge I would have the fan stuck at 40%, ramping up to 100% at 75)

 

Hmm that's strange...I wish I could remember exactly what I did, because with my system the fan doesn't cycle on and off repeatedly as it did before I made the fix

My fan will come on and stay on for about a minute or so...I don't have a program installed that controls the fan either. I'll let you know if I find the exact solution that worked for me.

EDIT: Take a look at this topic, I recognize it from my random surfing and trying to find the answer to a solution myself almost half a year ago...haha: http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-xps-studio-xps/570946-xps-15-l502x-constant-fan-off.html

Go to add/remove programs and ensure the Nvidia System Tools aren't installed. When you installed the beta driver, did you do the "Express" option? I only install the bare graphics driver along with the Nvidia Update software. I don't install the 3d driver and audio drivers. I would give it one more shot by completely stripping the driver off, rebooting, and reinstalling using the *custom* option when installing the Nvidia driver, and only select the Graphics driver (don't think you can deselect that anyway, there wouldn't be any point!) and if you want, the Nvidia update components *only*. Also make sure to check the "clean install" part too. Hope this might help!

And make sure you remove anything that has to do with Nvidia in the add/remove programs prior to reinstalling

 

usually this is cause by the use of some temperature diagnostic tool (ie HWMonitor...)
Are you sure you have none in the running in the background?