Surging fans on the 7805u

So I think the fan scheme on this laptop is rather odd.

Thank god the fans work great and my CPU idles at 25-35 in normal conditions
Same with the GPU and HD they idle at 40-45 when not at work

During intense hours of gaming the fans are spinning nonstop(as they should) and the GPU never gets above 79 degrees and the HD never above 55 degrees and the CPU never above 60 degrees. So i think it is safe to say that my cooling system is in tact and working well.

Question: I assume this laptop has 2 fans? The vent in the right rear is for the CPU and the vent on the left side is for the GPU? Sound about right?

Heres whats weird and I only have one theory to explain it..

My fans (esp. one on the left/side) "surge" while at idle for no apparent reason. Like it is loud and you can tell the fan is not spinning in a uniform speed it speeds up and surges back and forth for long periods of time! You can hear it surging! Im sure some of you notice this. What could it be? Why not just keep it at a uniform speed rather than surge hard and stop then surge then stop. It is almost like it cant find a normal speed to spin at and it is annoying. It makes me feel like something is malfunctioning!

My only assumption is that I live in Arizona and if my condo gets up to 80 plus the fans will just surge to cool? But the CPU/GPU/HD are within normal temps so??

Whay cant the fans just grab a normal speed and stop surging ????Ahhh

 

This is a common "issue" for most Gateway FX owners. I live in Illinois and my GPU fan does the same.

From Andrew's P-7811FX review:

 

That is so weird..a "hyper cooling system"??? I mean wouldnt one think that takes a toll on the fan/bearings and battery (voltage to send spurts)? Is "hyper cooling" a normal cooling system practice? Or is this something gateway is experimenting with. To me it doesnt sound like a effiecient process

 

all 3 of my FXes (the 2 working ones and the one that i sent back for one of the now working ones)
does this, i assume it's normal

 

Yeah all FXs have done it since the 7811s (Centrino 2) were released. The older 6831 / 6860 models didn't exhibit the behaviour.

 

Here's the solution I'm using for this problem:

Go here and download the NVidia tools:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvidia_system_tools_6.03.html

This will install a performance tool that enables you to modify the GPU clock settings. Run the tool and click on "device settings". Change the GPU core clock speed to 400 Mhz (slightly underclocked...)

Then google "Powermizer Switch" and download the application (I downloaded version 1.2) to disable "powermizer", which is a program that is supposed to throttle your GPU up and down to save power.

My personal experience with powermizer is that it throttled my cpu up and down at all the wrong times. During video playback and gameplay, powermizer was downclocking my GPU all the way down to 168 Mhz, and all the way up to 600 Mhz, where it was overheating and then clocking back down to 168 again. So disabling it and setting the GPU to a constant 400Mhz is a good compromise.

Powermizer switch informed me that some registry keys didn't exist and I clicked yes to add them. This seemed to work fine. I then ran the app and disabled powermizer completely.

I'm a little disappointed in NVidia, or Gateway, or both for providing such a crappy gpu speed / thermal controller without the ability to disable it. The 7805u is a gaming laptop, and should provide ability to control more settings than a casual web surfing laptop.

hope that helps someone with this annoying problem.

 

Just a note, I know my previous post doesn't directly address the surging fan. I haven't had the fan surging problem since I did this modification. Also, I did notice that before this change the GPU was getting throttled up to 600Mhz and back down even when I was doing nothing at all or just surfing the web.

As far as I can tell so far, my gpu fan is much more stable now.

Good luck!

 

Tunzis, what is your gpu idle temperature with underclock/powermizer switch off?

I've tried your method and it seems to reduce the surging problem somewhat, but now the GPU idle temperature is around 50c.

 

Every laptop that I've owned has done this. There's nothing wrong,as long as your fans don't stay on, or they don't come on at all.... that's a reason to be worried.