Fan problem(?) with Samsung NP550P5C-AD1BR

Hello! This is my first post here

So, i have this particular situation, i bought my NP550P5C at january 2013, never had problems with it, but i always thought its fans were particular slow when compared to other laptops.

I'm a gamer, so i bought this notebook with the intention of playing some games on it, since the nvida 630m is a decent card for low/mid-end gaming.

After some time gaming, i noticed something common in laptops, the Throttling. The GPU temperature raised to 90ºC and then started to throttle, reducing its core from 700mhz to 475mhz, which can have a big impact in FPS.

I tried various methods to reduce throttling, bought a cooling pad, cleaned the vents, applied new thermal paste, and i have been able to reduce some of the throttle, although not entirely.
Also i was sure the laptop was running on Maximum Perfomance mode and Silent Mode off.

Also, important to mention silent mode never applied too much difference to the fan speeds, which i found weird.

So, here's the funny thing and the one that made me write this thread:
Yesterday, i decided to clean and reapply thermal paste once again. But this time, i did a kind of "better" cleaning, and i'm not sure if it was because of that, but when i booted up my NP550P5C again, the fan were running incredibly faster than before. So i decided to test some games, and there it was, the throttle was gone and the temperature was between 75ºC to 80ºCmax while gaming, which was clearly an improvement.

The fan become faster everytime the laptop was hot, then after the laptop cooled down, it became silent again.
Presumably, the Silent Mode from Samsung Settings was marked "automatic", so i thought to myself "so now this is working huh".

I was happy with the result, but it was late night, and i went to sleep.

So next morning, i boot up my NP550P5C and the fan was back to its "forever weak" state. I was very dissapointed with it and decided to inspect the insides of my laptop once again.
After some minor cleaning, i booted up it again, and the fan was still weaker.

So my question is: What caused and how can i bring back my fan increased speed?
My guess is it has something to do with silent mode being somewhat buggy(?)

Some information that may be useful:

- I use an extra monitor(1920x1080) via HDMI cable
- All drivers are updated. This includes GPU, BIOS, Sound...
- I'm running Windows 8.1
- Intel i7-3630QM 2.40GHz \\ Nvidia Geforce 630m 2gb \\ 8GB RAM DDR3

 

Hello lucasgolin, welcome to NBR.

It sounds like Silent Mode is indeed the problem. Most users are surprised to learn that Silent Mode AUTO means Silent Mode is ACTIVE, and the computer is forced into low performance in order to keep the fans from running. Your CPU will be capped at very low speed in this mode, making it bad for gaming. If you switched it to the High Performance power plan, the GPU may have been running at full speed, so it still worked acceptably, even with the CPU on its knees.

Keep Silent Mode OFF for normal operation, and use the Samsung Optimized power plan, which will let the CPU run at full speed when needed it, but let it rest when there is less work to do. You can tweak Samsung Optimized to your needs (as described in the links below). Toggle Silent Mode with Fn-F11 only when you want power frugal operation (quiet, but slower) and tweak the Power Saver plan to your needs. When in Silent Mode, AUTO turns fans on/off as needed, LOW keeps them running constantly at low speed.

Samsung like to do things their own way, not the standard Windows way (or Android way for that matter). The following posts explain how power settings are generally handled on Samsung laptops:

Overview of Samsung Power settings

About Windows Power Profiles (Power Plans)

Silent Mode explained (Win7 but also applies to Win8)

 

Hey, thanks!

I've been looking through the threads you sent me. Even when Silent Mode was Disabled and power options were set to High Performance/Samsung Optmized, the fan was still in silent mode.

So, i did the following:
Uninstalled Samsung Settings
Went to my BIOS configuration, and reseted all settings do default

After that, the fan start working normally again! Weird part it's not stronger as before, not sure the reason why, but the throttling stopped. So, it was probably Samsung Settings interfering with bios configuration or something(?), i'm not really an expert with all of this, so that's just a wild guess.

Again, thanks for your help, keep up the good work! Glad

 

Thank you for the update.

That was a perfect fix on your part: Re-installing Settings (which controls power management in Windows) and resetting BIOS settings (which controls everything, in particular the fans). Not a wild guess at all!

 

I was going through the same problem. I had a low cpu temp, low cpu usage and low memory usage and I was wondering what was happening. After removing samsung setting my fps went back up. Thanks samsung for the bloatware, also thank you for helping me find the answer!

 

Hi nspiration, welcome to NBR.

The symptoms you describe could also just have been Silent Mode accidentally enabled. Lots of users fall into that trap.

In any case would I highly recommend you re-install Settings. While Samsung does indeed include some bloatware in factory installations, Settings is hard to live without: In addition to the visible Settings Control Center (Fn-F1) it also controls a lot of hardware features, such as Fn-keys, keyboard backlight, and power management.

Check the thread linked below for recommended Settings versions (depending on your model) and where to find them.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/settings-easy-settings-what-you-need-to-know.729139/