Disabling fan=Better battery life?

Self explanatory;

On my x100e(Netbook) I can turn the fan completely off. In the short time that I have been messing around with it my core temperatures are right around the 50C without the fan on. With the fan on the temperatures are right around 40C.

My question is; Is that slight temperature hike going to hurt battery life more than having the fan on?

I understand that actually testing it myself is going show the true results, but I was just wondering if anyone has had any experience with this.

~350

 

A laptop fan may take around .5w-5w depending on the amperage. If it remember correctly all laptop fan should be 5v.
Typically you are talking a .27a~ fan which uses around 1w of power at max fan speed and can use very little fan speed.

Yes you can disable the fan but to be honest if your running on power saver, the fan will work at low RPM speeds, meaning whatever battery life you save will not be worth the overheating of the laptop.

Just noticed your running a netbook, don't even turn off the fan the amount of power the fan uses is probably well under 1w.

 

If OP feels comfortable with those temperatures but you wouldn't notice a significant difference in battery life, just like 5400 rpm notebook drive to an SSD.

Disabling fan has other benefits, less noise, no worry about dust clogging up the fan and overheating the notebook.

 

= fried laptop! Disregard that inane line of thinking OP. As a power conservation measure, turning off your fan is inconsequential.

 

Well I'm thinking about making my Latitude 13 fanless...has ULV Core 2 Duo, will be putting in an SSD and will undervolt it...am I crazy?

Edit: If he's trying to kill his laptop intentionally without like dropping it and voiding the warranty, that'd be an easy thing to do!

 

I use it for school.....

The fan on this thing is always running at a moderate speed, even with the CPU and GPU settings at their lowest. I'm only using word, excel, and browsing the web.(No flash)

The laptop it running about as hot as it does while plugged in, so I feel there is little chance of heat damage.

 

use tpfancontrol to control the fan speeds on your thinkpad.

 

That's what I using. The "SMART" setting. I didn't take the fan out or cut the wires for the fan off, etc. (Just in case someone thought I did.)

 

Yes, I had an Acer 3810T. I undervolted the SU9400, had an Intel SSD and it was so quiet the fan was not an annoyance but was still necessary in cooling.

 

Hrm well still thinking about it. Was inspired by Commander Wolf's fanless E6400..

 

TPFanControl is best thing since solid state. I think every manufacturer should allow some sort of fan control within safe limits, but I supposed we all know that end users are idiots and will mess it up.

Generally I consider anything under 60C more or less safe, but I do 55C to 45C on my x200t because I feel that it's a better balance between noise and heat. When the laptop idles at 30-35C with the fan off, I just think see why manufacturers feel the need to have the thing running at all at that point.

Of course there is going to be some affect on the lifespan of the machine, but I'm going to say it's negligible within these limits, and if it isn't, I'm perfectly willing to take the risk for a quieter system.

 

Except Commander Wolf's E6400 has a cooling system capable of cooling the Core 2 Duo@ 3.0 ghz. By switching to a SU core, the e6400 cooling system is far more then what the SU9300 needs. (35w C2D vs 10w SU9300).

The Latitude 13 is designed to cool a SU7300 at maximum (10w TDP) so the cooling system will likely have a TDP dissipation of around 10w.

 

Hrm well that's a good point, on idle my SU7300 is like 15C when ambient was 17C, full load doesn't go above like 30-35...

 

In the end it's a $500 laptop and I'm not worried about it lasting forever.

So the general consensus is that with or without the fan on, battery life is going to be nearly the same?

 

Fan speed 0:

~ 5.9W

Fan speed 1:

~ 6.1W

Fan speed 7:

~ 6.8W

Measured on the x200t, full idle, brightness level 1. Granted these are all approximate measures taken from RMClock, it suggests that there's a measurable (though not necessarily significant) difference in power consumption with no fan activity and low fan speeds.

EDIT: Of course, your mileage will vary depending on the size of your fan, its RPM at fan speed 1 and 7, etc, etc. The effect on your system varies as well. 0.2W on a 5.9W system is about 3%, but 0.5W on a 5W system is 10%, and with, say, a 50WHr battery, that's the difference between 4.5Hrs and 5Hrs.

 

Makers put those fans in there for a reason. Fans aren't free, the design work takes time, adds to manufacturing complexity, etc, etc.

Heat rarely kills components in a single instance. Heat stress builds up over time.

If your notebook was intended to be fanless or if it was capable of being fanless, don't you think that the maker would design it and sell it that way.

Fanless machines command a market premium.

I'll put $20- down right now that the OP will be back here in a few months complaining about how his brilliantly modified laptop crashed 'for no reason' and can't any of us here help him fix it.

 

Alot of netbooks are fanless but the palm rest heats up to a million degrees. I opened up the original eeePC with the underclocked Celeron M, and the palmrest was the heatsink, and the CPU had no thermal paste on it.

Once the G3 Intel SSD's come out I will try to modify my Latitude 13 to be fanless..

 

Observing that some machines use different cooling methods, using that as justification for wishing that your own machine could do the same while ignoring the differences in design and components shows a significant lack of understanding of how the innards of a notebook work.

Using a low-heat hdd or ssd will do NOTHING to cool your CPU or the chipset/GPU. It's a myth that the heat dispersion of an ssd is automatically less than that of an hdd anyway.

Be careful out there.

 

isn't that fans consume only certain % of the battery life compare to CPU and all those mumbo jumbos inside the motherboard?

 

There is certainly a difference between your laptop atm staying very cool with the fan on, and heat building up quickly without the fan turning on.

While the fan is on the heatsink is acting as a momentary medium for the heat as the fan brings in cooler air to dissipate the heat. This is obviously giving you great results.
The heatsink is likely quite small, or smaller then in fanless notebook. It has a certain amount of heat it can hold before the heat transfer between the heatsink and processor becomes inefficient and temperature begins to go up. I've seen it happen time and time again on laptops where I turn the fan off or set it to a lower speed. At first the temperatures are fine, but after 30 minutes I begin to see an increase in idle temperatures as I stress the processor more and more.

 

If the manufacturer doesn't allow you to turn the fan off by default I think its a safe assumption that disabling the fan is probably not a good idea. A tremendous amount of work goes into the thermal aspect of a design, particularly with regard to computer systems (my brother is a mechanical engineer that specialized in heat transfer), and manufacturers reluctantly include more elements in a design that necessary, particularly for an ultraportable system like a netbook/small laptop, so if they included a fan it's probably for a very good reason.