CLEVO Drivers Update Utility by OBSIDIAN-PC

Fan Control should not even work unless it´s registered.
If it does is a bug and im not even sure what parts of it are working or not!!!!
Do not install unless you have a license.
I will try to make a demo version later when i get it to a "finished" state.

 

It still doesn't show up and the closest thing to fancontrol.ini[ i saw was fancontrol_def.ini and i was hoping to actually buy it but ithe window never shows up so i don't wanna be in a situation where i have it and can't use it.

 

Sadly my auto shutdown problem comes back again. It seems like it's not related laptop temperature as I even my laptop at super high temperature it's still no auto shutdown. @John@OBSIDIAN-PC, can check whether you accidentally put debug code into the app(s)? Looks like the auto shutdown issue only happens when I press some keys or combinations of keys.

 

You mean you installed the standalone version (the one in my signature) and when you open it from C:\Program Files\FanControl\FanControl.exe the window never showed up? If that´s the case something is blocking it, because that´s just a simple GUI, nothing fancy about it that would not allow it to start.
Also after you double click it if you do CTR+ALT+DEL it´s not running at all right?

I´m adding 3 possible ways of using FanControl so you can guys test and check which is the most stable for your laptop

 

Anyone else's antivirus trying to quarantine control station? My Bitdefender put the controlstation.exe file in quarantine after i updated it.

 

You should uninstall bitdefender, honestly. It causes more problems than it fixes. They used to be better many years ago but slowly became more and more obtrusive.

 

I use Avast, and yes it blocked initial setups of FC and the others, but only temporarily while it checked files. If I was too impatient I disabled it and ran the install/update.

 

BTW guys, updates, special on FC been slow, i know...
Been dealing with a lot, BIOS work, 9th gen updates (Control Station is now compatible), and..... i´m moving home to a place near OBSIDIAN-PC

 

Good work, man!

Got some questions though about the updater. Received several updates including Creative Connect (the new 2.1.7.0 version isn't working), new version of Intel WiFi (installed but still showing older version in both updater and device manager) and the new option to install HID filter (saying that my system isn't compatible). Tried re-installation but to no avail. Thank you in advance for the respond.

 

Hummmmm.
It's all working with latest BIOS (9th gen).
So this means I'll have to split stuff according to hardware or BIOS version.

Enviado do meu MI Note 2 através do Tapatalk

 

I can see, that Realtek has a new environment, so I guess, that Connect didn't receive treatment for that? Anyway, the program is working, but saying, that device can't be detected.

 

I hope you get some news about the RTXs soon too .

 

Think i need to post pics to explain more https://imgur.com/a/37iWJTy and https://imgur.com/a/1DzAcSN

The program launches but the window for it shows nothing and no matter what i click on it doesn't show up.

 

+1 to this. The shutdowns I've experienced happened while I was typing.

 

Since I stopped using the CCC and Hotkey applications, the headphones always stop working after resuming from standby. "Apply headphone fix" option in Control Station doesn't seem to fix it either. This is on a P950HR using the latest Realtek audio drivers. Anyone have any ideas? So far the only option is to reboot.

 

Headphone fix for me hasn't worked since early September, so it's been a few months since the sleep mode issue has been mitigated.

 

I've been using only bluetooth headphones for a few months now so I haven't really come across the issue, but the occassions where I do want to plug a pair in they never work since I've usually resumed from sleep at some point before that.

 

Anyone had same problems as me, described in this message? I'm not sure, if those updates were shipped for every model out there, but I have the P775TM1, and I tried both Updater app and downloading those drivers from Clevo's website.

EDIT: So I re-checked both audio drivers and SBX and it seems that this problem is caused by new Realtek drivers, since they are now being shipped without Realtek HD Audio Manager, but rather with the new "Audio Console" or whatever, so SBX now doesn't see the input anymore. I might re-test other possibilities but it seems that there is some misunderstanding between both.

 

I´m gonna revert until we clear this up.
It might be something to do with latest BIOS/EC/EC2 updates. Not sure. Will do more testing and then report back.

 

Hello John, is it possible to release the latest stable version again? Right now my Fan Control goes nuts every few seconds. it have a feeling that it hits the security level if only one of 12 cores goes above 91°, which happens frenquently (Even after changing my machine, same laptop model, same high cpu temps). maybe its a bug and it doesnt use the average temp of all cores combined? also the fan duty bars are still bugged. im stuck with 2.0.9. a few releases before it went smooth as **** and my laptop kept silent the whole working day. thx in advance!

 

I think that using the single core max temp is the right choice if we are considering a security setting.

Using the average core temp could let one unlucky core to cook, especially in case of bad thermal paste distribution or similar scenarios.

 

We´re making serious changes in the Fan Control Software.
Which will include features, optimizations, new methods for EC stuff, etc.
In the meanwhile i would advise installing the standalone version and get rid of the old LaptopTools install (the one that included all 4 apps in the same dir).

 

Hm ok. dunno what causes this but my laptop went from supersilent to unusable with 2.0.9. i will try the standalone.

ok, uninstalled 2.0.9, all custom settings gone and installed 2.0.9, which is the version you have in your sig. wtf? is there an archive? i need a stable version, not the bugged one.

 

Latest is stable, in your case you are just triggering max temps security right?

 

@John@OBSIDIAN-PC

since you are making big changes to fan control I will suggest a couple of feature changes :

- remove fan update interval and cpu ramping step and replace it with max fan speed change (% per second)
- add linear interpolation to fan settings. You could even reduce the number of temperature ranges and fan speed resolution since 5 temperature ranges with a 1/100 fan speed resolution would still guarantee a much smoother curve if the curve gets linearly interpolated (vs the actually step curve).

 

2.0.9 is bugged on both of my laptops. look at the screenie pls. fan dutys out of control, security setting triggered every few seconds. in manual mode. as you can see at the bottom, the real temps are nowhere near 91°

 

How are those values fetched by the desktop widget thing? Have you tried closing it?
Something in you system is probably querying the EC too, that´s a no go. Unfortunately there is no ideal solution:

- Getting values and sending values using WMI with CLEVOMOF - Causes DPC Spikes (it stacks in the ACPI)

- Getting values and sending values using by Query the EC directly - Some people complain about shutdowns and keyboard stop working, possible cause is EC flood, having other software like HWInfo sensors doing queries is just adding even more flood.

Solution? Trying to find the minimal safe value for the pool interval and cross fingers that it will not break anything. Some systems seem more solid then others, possibly systems with dual ITCs like P7xx series? Not sure, that´s where i am at the moment. Testing and testing.

 

I'm curious, what is your actual polling interval? I don't think you need a very small polling interval for being safe, especially considering thermal inertia and your feedback loop response speed.

 

There is no simple pool interval, there are various intervals:

Reading Intervals:
- One to pool CPU Temp from EC
- One to pool each fan duty

Writing Intervals:
- One to write each fan speed or set fans to Automatic

It seems the trick is using intervals in which the EC does not get flooded or inaccessible to other crucial queries from bios??? Not sure...

So, i was AT LEAST able to reproduce conditions where i could cause the EC to report wrong values by running a cycle of WMI commands to make the clevomof do something (example: disable touchpad), then i kept speeding it up until the EC started to go crazy and showing erroneous data in the debug.

From there i started tuning the update intervals until i could have really fast updates on the WMI commands without any bad data being reported by the EC.
This is not an ideal test scenario and different models seem to behave different.

What does this mean? It means moving forward i can´t allow the users to have control over the update interval since it basically increases or decreases the update interval (pooling).
So i had to remove the Fan Update interval from Fan Control, and... i will have to keep tuning it according to the "Worst" model, ill keep testing different laptops until i find the one which needs the bigger update interval value.
In the future i can make the app detect the model and use values optimized per model.

I just released a Fan Control Update, version 2.1.1
Improved EC Pooling / Writing
Removed the option to set fan update interval, moving forward we will use steps amount only
Updated Framework Libraries
Settings are now correctly stored in user documents even if user changed the documents path
Improved Security trigger condition to avoid trigger on spikes

Fan Update Speed is slower now so you might want to use bigger steps.
Also added a 3 hits counter to enable the security triggers so that it avoids triggering on fast temperature spikes.

Anyone who was reporting random shutdowns, please report it!! Is it better now? Do you still have shutdowns or keyboard locks?

Thanks

 

Fan control update won't successfully install. It downloads, goes through the install process, opens and says there is an update. Loops through that process again and again, never gets past 2.0.9
Also, fan control appears to not do anything.... only fan control i have right now is Fn+1..... anyone else?

Edit: ok, did a clean delete and install of the fan control. seems to work now.

 

With so many intervals, and Windows not being a Real Time OS, I think that you are running into race conditions, more so when you add all the other programs that can talk with the EC..

Maybe food for though, maybe you already considered all that and I'm talking non-sense.

 

@john the rainmeter desktop widget uses coretemp. does that help?

to be honest i didnt realy understand anything you wrote lately. can you ELI5 what i should do now?

 

You do not need it to be realtime.
Ideally you would want a temporary memory where you would stack commands.
I have no control how the EC gets the data and how the EC reports the data.
If there are Race Conditions then it´s in the EC implementation, which we don´t even have any idea how it works.
One of the advantages we had with using the CLEVOMOF was it used the ACPI which stacks. The problem with it is that other drivers use it and the bigger the stack the bigger is the DPC (something like that...).
I do not believe manufacturers will ever be open enough about their ECs, even less willing to make proper APIs for 3rd party developers to do stuff.

History also show us that brands that sell CLEVO, do not care much about fan behavior, software solutions that make clients life easy and such. So people buying CLEVO complain about fans, about bios updates, about drivers, about everything actually. Sometimes something is done, other times it takes years to solve bugs that have been reported 100000 times over the span of several years (hotkey keyboard and mouse filter anyone?).

So CLEVO owners have to get modded BIOS from some guy in a forum and buy software from a 3rd party company that they also discovered in a forum (yours truly).

If only i would get contacted by a manufacturer saying "Hey we appreciate what you are doing, we also manufacture laptops and we would love that you could work with our R&D team to come up with solutions. We will give you all the support you need and we would love to get advice on how to empower developers to improve their laptop brand..." if that days comes, i´ll jump off the CLEVO boat.

 

Chill out John. I don't know how low you can get in terms of programming environment. If you are forced to stay at the Windows OS level, I don't think you can get anything miraculous due to the already mentioned race conditions. It's not about your way of writing the code or anything.

If you have access to EC automatic fan settings, can't you just overwrite the control setting at that level (don't know if it's firmware level or what) for example? If yes then you could be able to use that low level PID control (or whatever it is, might be PI, or even P only) without the need of constantly polling values from Windows for read/write fan speed and cpu temperature.

 

I don´t even understand what i wrote lately.

Here´s a plain explanation about the State of the Union:
I would like to be spending my time developing new features, improving my apps UI and doing new stuff (so many ideas for new software), but i am stuck with trying to find a working solution for Fan Control that:
A) Does not causes latency
B) Does not causes the reported shutdowns / keyboard blocking
So investigation points out to the source of the problems being EC incapacity to respond to all the calls our software+other software+bios makes, so i released an update some hours ago, that increased the intervals so that the EC is capable of responding in time to everything.

So you should update/reinstall Fan Control and report if it´s now working correctly for you.
You should also avoid using other software that might be increasing the amount of queries to the EC, example:
- HWInfo Sensors
- Clevo Control Center

Hope this helps.

 

I did a clean install of 2.1.1 and turned off core temp. problem still exists. i dont need that security setting at all. i mean, the EC doesn't even have this thing. i repeat myself but:

i changed my working machine, same moddel, new laptop. same temps! same cpu spike behaviour!
it does spike up to 94°. thats how it is and i dont care as my cpu or EC doesnt care either.
the pastejob is fine, done by me, the paste is top end kryonaut.

its just the nature of this combination of barebone + CPU generation.

pls let me turn off this security thing. or roll back a few versions, everything was fine then.
btw: fan dutys both at 100% all the time.

 

It does not matter at which level you access the EC, it does not matter what command you are executing.
It seems that whatever the method, the more you access it / send data to it or request data from it, the more you might flood it and create issues, so you need to time your access.
You can access the EC by using the same method as Clevo Control Center (a WMI method), or you can access it using 3rd party library / ntport to bypass the ACPI method, it´s all the same. The more you exchange data with it chances are it might get unresponsive. These are just my conclusions, might not be true.

So while some models freeze the Keyboard (probably models with only one ITC) other models do not (probably because the Keyboard uses a second ITC), hence my conclusions.

So indeed i can test and time my access to prevent flooding, BUT, i can´t control the user system and prevent the user to ALSO install CCC / HWInfo / Other software that might create EC queries.

Does this makes sense?

 

For me the lastest, smooth and quiet running version was just before the 2.0 release. can i get this pls? and how do i stop the automatic update. i think we need a checkbox for that.

 

It shouldn't be like this though. I mean, at very low level, no problems should exist since EC-automatic control works wonder and even has an interpolated response which means there are even more calculations involved. I don't know if it's something at firmware level or even at hardware level but that type of control is totally independent from Windows OS. It looks like the feedback loop is closed at a lower level than Windows OS so whatever happens at Windows level doesn't affect the behavior.

On the other hand I completely agree on what you say. If you access EC or whatever at higher level, there is for sure the risk of encountering some I/O bottlenecking and/or race conditions somewhere in the communication chain.

 

Ok yeah i see, your problem is just that you are constantly triggering the security Max Temperature for the CPU right?

Ok i made two changes and just released version 2.1.2:
- You can now increase that to 98ºC, hope that´s enough for you

Let me know if addition configuration is needed for making it work in your system.

 

Awesone, even 95° should be enough. it NEVER gets higher. but tjmax on most cpus is 100° anyway. i think 98 is fine.

the fan duty bars are bugged as well but i realy dont care about that as long is my laptop keeps quiet thx again.

 

It would be interesting to find out why are your Current Fan Duties bars are not correct.
Is everything else working? When you change values in the User Modes, dragging sliders up and down do make fans changes?

 

John,

I updated to the new version of windows 1809 and I have noticed the custom fan settings no longer work.

I set the fans to MAX at 30'C, when my CPU temp is above that and nothing happens. I have to run my fans at maximum speed right now to play games.

Can you please look into this? Thank you!

 

so after some testing:

sec. trigger set to 97° but it still triggers at the 91°.
The two "Current Fan Duties" bars seem to show random values and are often stuck @99%. this happens on 2 different laptop models.
i dont wanna test around with my sliders, as long as i cant save them. it took a bit to adjust them.

 

Working perfect on all my machines. Are you sure they aren´t just taking too long to go up?
Check the values in the Behaviour tab, ramping steps make them go up or down faster (bigger value) or slower (smaller value).

 

@John@OBSIDIAN-PC
Are you soon going to make the feature where you can sync CPU with GPU2 again? I really need that feature

 

Hummmm wasnt it supposed to be SYNC GPU FAN2 to CPU ?

 

Can you release a version with a working security slider? it still triggers @ 91°.
i will keep an eye on the bars, maybe its realy just delayed.

 

Here´s a cool feature so that you can check what is going on:

STEP 1 : Stop the service



Step2: Open CMD as ADMINISTRATOR and go to the Monitor Folder, should be C:\Program Files\FanControl\monitor for Standalone installs


Step3: Now Type ClevoService -e


Now you have a debugger to check what is going on:


You can check which temperatures is the EC Reporting and check what is the security safe temperature doing....
@NomadFX :
Not only do i allow you to set it to 98ºC but i´m doing a 6 hits in a row count.
So imagine you set the security value to 98ºC, it will only trigger the max fan speed when it is reported 6 times in a row by the EC, so for your laptop to be triggering the max temp security in a incorrect way we would have to assume the the EC went crazy and actually reported it 6 times in a row, it´s 6 totally clean and different pools!!! That´s almost impossible!


Here´s an example of max temps security being hit:

For testing i set my security value to 80ºC:
So as you can see after my CPU reaches 80ºC it gives one count, then another, then another until it reaches 6 then as you can see:
"Critical Values Count reached 6!! Setting fans to Secure Max Speed"
and then i stop my burning software and the count is reset back to 0 almost immediate.

With 6 counts and the ability to set it to 98ºC if you are still triggering it then i don´t know what to say to you, i sell the same units, we test them, we put both the CPU and GPU to 100%, our units wont even leave our assembly line if they are going above 90ºC...

 

Take a look, it´s working perfect, tested it at 96, i wont go above that on the 7700K:



At 96ºC it started counts...
After 6 consecutive counts it triggers, even this is dangerous at such high temperatures, it allowed my CPU to reach 98ºC.