Passive vs Active Cooling

In power manager, I usually use Active cooling for Max Perf. plan on both AC and Batt, and Passive Cooling for Max Batt Life.

What do you guys use on Power Source Optimized?

Anyone notice actual noise or throttling differences between Active and Passive cooling?

EDIT: Also, what's the difference between "Balance all parameters" and "reduce noise dynamically" for the "optimize fan control to:" setting under system settings in PM.

 

dunno for sure but:
I always use active cooling to get it over with quickly, since I don't do processor intensive applications while on battery anyway

as for noise, isn't passive with no fan on?

dynamic likely is the fan, balance is a combo of fan+passive, I suppose?

 

I use the power manager only to keep my battery charging withing the threshold that I've specified earlier. For fan purposes I use tpfancontrol.

 

Sensibly, the passive cooling would allow higher temperatures before the fan gets to work. However, I see no significant difference on my T420s and use TFFanControl to prevent what I consider to be the pointless quest to get the CPU down to room temperature.

I'm sure I used to see the "reduce noise dynamically" option, but it's no longer there in my Power Manager. Are you using a recent version of PM? I would suspect that reduce noise dynamically might limit the maximum CPU performance as a consequence of reducing the maximum fan speed.

TPFanControl, as already recommended, is the best solution for managing fan activity.

John

 

Thanks for the help guys. I think I've got the fan settings nailed down. Its annoying though because at least 2 or 3 different settings in PM affect fan behavior and they all interact with each other in an unexpected (to me) way.

Miro and J.R. - TPFC was one of the first solutions I found, but I read recent posts that the new PM and PM driver don't play well TPFC and it's recommended to do either/or instead of both like it always has worked, which is why I held off on it. I'm currently using PM 3.64 and PM driver 1.64. Are either of you guys using TPFC reliably with these versions?

 

I use the W520 version of TPFC which behaves fine most of the time. However, sometimes after handing fan control to the BIOS (which I have set for >80C) it fails to get the control back whereupon I hear fan noise when the computer is idle.

John