Reduce fan noise

hey guys, my fans from my W860CU are alwas present, any way to reduce that in office mode / idle ?

 

I am trying to get a beta firmware/BIOS update for the "Silent Mode" for this notebook.... stay tuned.

 

Yes, there are ways to decrease fan speed:
Any of my suggestions you read after this line will result in voiding your warranty

so lets get to it:
1) Open your laptop up, locate where the fans connect to the motherboard.
You need to look for a fan controller. If you do not know what it looks like, take a good picture with your camera and I can point out to you which one it is. On every laptop there is one fan controller per fan.

2) Now to decrease fan speed. There are three ways to do this, two are a bit nicer than the other

2.1) Grab a soldering iron, a magnifying glass and make some work space, and get ready to work. This first means is to electronically slow down your fans. To do this, have access to a number of different resistors. You will want different grades, so that you can control how slow the fans go. Resistors burn excess current, which will slow your fans down. However note that when the fan controller is outputting current to tell the fans to go full speed, they will not go full speed, they will go say 80% of full speed (percentage based off the ohms of resistance used)

2.2) Slightly nicer. If you have a good knowledge of electronics, or know someone who does, you can solder in a microcontroller to override what the onboard controller is telling the fan controller to do. All you need to do is be able to control it, which can be done through any serial or parallel interface. However you really need to know what you are doing in order to get this right.

2.3) ugly - Solder on some wires to either end of the fan controller. Make sure the wires have a good length on them. You will need the length. If you have some room in a harddrive bay or somewhere accessible on your laptop. (you can drill a hole in the side or whatever) Find a spot to mount a 2-3 watt potentiometer in. Than you can manually control the fan speed with the turn of a knob. You can be smart about this too, you can short the fan controller, so the fan is locked at full, and than be able to control fan speed from off and any range to full with the potentiometer.

I wouldnt suggest doing BIOS flashes, especially when coming from an UNTRUSTED source.

K-TRON

 

Well, thanks guys. i would use a Bios rather than changing anything to the hardware.

But your right that trying ANY Bios is not what i want. Isn't there any official statement of a new Bios coming out?

Is there a forum we can report that to Clevo?

 

Or you could just look into modifying the DSDT at the software level. Unless you enjoy soldering.

 

What do you mean by that?

 

He means editing your DSDT tables in registry. Just extract the entry using Cygwin or similar, convert it to .asl using MS or Intel ASL Compiler, edit the values in notepad, save it and convert it back to .aml, then overwrite the current DSDT entry with the one you edited with the compiler.

You can't make the fan speeds quieter since they are already running at their slowest speed allowed on the 5v rail. But you can make them turn on less frequently by raising the threshold temperature, which isn't recommended.

 

are u 100 % sure u cant slow them down ? well i hope a official bios will fix that, since the whole notebook isnt hot at all, so the fans can be slowed down a bit i guess....

 

Like K-TRON said, you can slow them down at the hardware level by patching in a resistor to the fan leads. You can pick up a whole bunch of them in different ohmages at your local RadioShack for less than $1. Keep in mind that this reduces fan power throughout it's whole operating spectrum.

 

Would this be possible on my M860TU? Because the fan kick in at 38c or something. Would be nice to increase the limit to 45c or something.

 

Yes, you can do that.

 

I wonder if the W860CU lacks proper silent mode, because the I7 CPU is too hot.

Before I made modifications, silent mode would've been suicide for my M860ETU.

 

its not the CPU heat actually.

its the BIOS and KBC firmware thats needs to be modified.

I am trying to get Clevo and Sager to give me a working firmware update that will get it to work properly.

stay tuned.

 

guys, one questions. when my fan goes faster, i get a little high pitched noise as well. can you confirm that?

 

Has anyone tried out any of these options in order to reduce fan noise?

Any luck on aquiring the bios update?(I guess not?)

Would it be possible to look for a software solution for this problem? Manipulating the input that the fan controllers are getting from the onboard controller?
I don't know how these fan speed regulating systems operate so I can't make an estimate of the situation.

 

this is a great news, actually. i will stay tuned, for sure

 

I wonder if that BIOS is still being pursued.

 

I found the VGA fan to be a the main source of noise. GPU undervolting/downclock + balanced profile cuts the noise down by quite a bit.

 

i agree with johny flash once the cpu sticker is removed most of the noise come from the vga fan.
with a radeon 5870, using amd gpu clock tool and setting the speed to 110 / 300 at startup help a lot the noise. there is a thread explaining that. of course you need to put back the speed to normal when using game or photoshop in hardware accelerated mode. wish they fix the video bios one day but i guess this will never happen....

johny how do you change the profile?

and how to undervolt the 5870?

 

Use desktop shortcuts with command lines for the Clock Tool. Just make a couple shortcuts, then add "-eng=xxx -mem=xxxx" at the end.

My undervolting thread is here. Please ignore the fact that my MemIO temps were really high. I needed to bend the cage out, it's fixed now.