fan noise is such a nuisance

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thinkweird · #1 Post by **thinkweird** » Sun Sep 24, 2006 11:39 pm

Why T43 has to have a third-party program to reduce its fan noise?

I asked another friend who has a different thinkpad R 50E. He said that his fan only works occasionally and the machine is very quite and cool.

But in the case of T43, the fan starts rotating from the very beginning of booting at the the scale of 7 (according to tptcontrol). And I am sitting in an air-conditioned room.

The temperature of this t43p stays around 54 centigrade and I have to adjust the fan level to 2 in order to make the noise tolerable.

I am a little disappointed with the fan noise. The ideal state should be: it stays quite most of the time and only run its fan at low speed ossionally.

christopher_wolf · #2 Post by **christopher_wolf** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 2:13 am

This doesn't happen to a majority of T43s, but it can happen on some and it not limited to the T4X Series. Many Thinkpads can have this "fan always on" problem.

That's why we have this forum for the TP FCU and related work on it and other methods for hardware level fan control.

Download it and give it a try!

agarza · #3 Post by **agarza** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 9:00 am

There are was to enhance heat dissipation.

Replacing CPU stock TIM if the best option. This, however, require you to pop-up your laptop. But the results are quite encouraging

alexzabr · #4 Post by **alexzabr** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 9:15 am

Xmm, yet once again I'm wondering whether this issue is typical for certain T4x series or can be seen as randomally spread within entire T4x line.
I see many compaints about this issue, yet my T43 (in my sig) is very quiet even under quite heavy processing load (albeit for short periods of time), the fan can be heard rarely enough not to consider it at all.

Perhaps 2668 series are indeed more successful in thi respect ? Sounds weird (because the same platform as most other generic T43's)...

thinkweird · #5 Post by **thinkweird** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 10:11 am

alexzabr: is your fan always on? even though it runs quitely. Or it just runs occasionally?

Is your laptop set to Max Performance in AC or just Balanced? I noticed that if I set it to Balanced, the fan is quitely running.

Please confirm your powersaving scheme.

alexzabr · #6 Post by **alexzabr** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 10:27 am

The fan doesn't seem to run all the time - either cannot be heard at all (I assume it doesn't run in this case) or hits high (very rarely and for few seconds long only).
Power scheme when on AC:

Maximum CPU Speed -> Adaptive
Optimize fan control to -> Maximize performance
Display brightness -> 5 out of 7 (though I set it manually to maximum at a times)

Idle timers:
Lower display brightness -> Never
Lower display refresh rate -> Never

agarza · #7 Post by **agarza** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 1:22 pm

Could you post your laptop components temperatures?
Use thinkpad T43 fan control to record those.

alexzabr · #8 Post by **alexzabr** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 2:40 pm

I did not installed fan control utilities (available in Utilities forum) on my machine - wasn't necessary.
Is there some IBM's own application existing in standard IBM install that reports the temperatures ? Or I have no choice but install the fan control program ?

christopher_wolf · #9 Post by **christopher_wolf** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 2:45 pm

alexzabr wrote:I did not installed fan control utilities (available in Utilities forum) on my machine - wasn't necessary.
Is there some IBM's own application existing in standard IBM install that reports the temperatures ? Or I have no choice but install the fan control program ?

The only IBM applications that I have seen that can read off the temperatures, not from all 9 sensors on the T43 though, is the Power Manager. There are also IBM supplied power management/ACPI drivers that *do* read the temps; but those aren't easily gotten to during normal operation. One needs to access to it, via something such as WinIO.sys, for that.

Just grab the TP FCU and use it, it comes in passive mode to begin with so it isn't even possible for it to harm anything in a non-active mode (you have to manually enable active mode). In passive mode, it simply reads off all the temperatures from all, in the case of the T43, 9 sensors via the WinIO driver and it's interface and reports them.

On the by and by, my T43 fan is pretty silent and my operating temperatures run in the following ranges given with percent usage per day;

37-41; 35%, light to medium amount of workload involving internet browsing, music, and word processing and/or spreadsheet calculations.

41-45; 45%, heavier loading, during applications of scientific/engineering software that renders to the screen and uses primarily the CPU (PyMol, MATLAB, ChemDraw/Chem3D active surface calculations and energy minimizations).

55-65; 15%, far heavier loading with numerous multi-tasking of aforementioned render tasks along with compute intensive sets of floating point calculations (stoichastic/thermal modeling of biomembranes via monte carlo simultations and processing of SPT data set).

65-72; 5%, heaviest loading involving background computations and render jobs whilst playing an intensive, DX9+OpenGL, game such as Sims 2 in Windowed Mode. Naturally, that is to pass the time until said jobs finish.

All of that is without using TP FC, so that is the normal behavior of the fan and the standard cooling reponse of my T43 over time. All temperatures are reported in degrees Celsius.

thinkweird · #10 Post by **thinkweird** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 2:46 pm

The noise problem is also reported on T60 as in this thread:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=79610

When the fan is running at low speed, I can hear the noise from the hard drive as well.

This is by no means the so-called state of the art laptop.

christopher_wolf · #11 Post by **christopher_wolf** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 3:05 pm

thinkweird wrote:The noise problem is also reported on T60 as in this thread:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=79610

When the fan is running at low speed, I can hear the noise from the hard drive as well.

This is by no means the so-called state of the art laptop.

Keep in mind this varies and, reading through the same thread, there could be other causes for it. In addition, there appears to be a preponderance of T60 owners that *do not* have the fan noise.

This only goes to show that this fan noise problem as been on many Thinkpads since the venerable 600 Series, the ancestor/proto-version of the T Series.

I have also heard fan noise in some *really* bizzare settings on some Thinkpads; e.g. the fans will spool up to max when the system tries to go into suspend, then do the same on resume.

How does this imply it is not "state-of-the-art?"

alexzabr · #12 Post by **alexzabr** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 3:28 pm

Just installed the utility, checked Active = 0 as recommended then tried to run it. I'm getting an error message window:

Error during initialization of WinIo Driver
(winio.sys is missing in app folder or failed to load)

the winio.sys does exist there (however named WinIo.sys, don't think it is case-sensitive though..). Any help ?

thinkweird · #13 Post by **thinkweird** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 3:47 pm

You need to set Active=1 or 2 to activate it.

But since your fan is quiet, I don't t think you need to install that.

thinkweird · #14 Post by **thinkweird** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 3:53 pm

On the by and by, my T43 fan is pretty silent and my operating temperatures run in the following ranges given with percent usage per day;

37-41; 35%, light to medium amount of workload involving internet browsing, music, and word processing and/or spreadsheet calculations.

41-45; 45%, heavier loading, during applications of scientific/engineering software that renders to the screen and uses primarily the CPU (PyMol, MATLAB, ChemDraw/Chem3D active surface calculations and energy minimizations)

For me, even the lightest work like internet browsing and word process can make the temp hoovers around

43-53 centigrade.

I guess that is the difference.

alexzabr · #15 Post by **alexzabr** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 3:54 pm

Xmm, I did not report fan issues with my machine, in fact I said mine is quiet and calm almost always.
However I was asked to measure and report back the temps (see previous posts in this thread) and I intended to do that by fan utility - just measure temps, not to alter the working mode (thus I do not need to activate it, just passive mode is fine).

agarza · #16 Post by **agarza** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 4:14 pm

alexzabr wrote:Xmm, I did not report fan issues with my machine, in fact I said mine is quiet and calm almost always.
However I was asked to measure and report back the temps (see previous posts in this thread) and I intended to do that by fan utility - just measure temps, not to alter the working mode (thus I do not need to activate it, just passive mode is fine).

Download WinIO driver here:
http://www.internals.com/utilities/utilities.htm

I'm just curious to know your machine temps.

alexzabr · #17 Post by **alexzabr** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 4:14 pm

Just reboted the machine, the utility came to work.
Right now working off the battery, no wireless (wireless is enabled but no connection), no LAN, no other applications running except of OS itself, Win explorer and TP FAN utility.
Temperatures:
CPU: 39 deg
APS: 40 deg
PCM: 33 deg
GPU: 41 deg
BAT: 34 deg
BAT: 32 deg
BUS: 37 deg
PCI: 44 deg
PWR: 40 deg

Highest: 44 deg (PCI)
Fan Speed: 3721 (+/-10-15 rpm)

Once loading by MATLAB calculations (takes about 3-4 sec to complete) - CPU temp rose by about 1-2 deg.

Hope this helps.

Now, wireless got connected, surfing the web:
GPU rose to 42 deg
BUS rose to 38 deg

agarza · #18 Post by **agarza** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 5:30 pm

WOW. You've really low temps

I cant lower to the low 40's my T41p even if I'm on battery.

I'm waiting to apply Zalman Super Thermal Grease that is even better than Arctic Silver 5.

You, indeed, have a very cool system.

fan noise is such a nuisance

fan noise is such a nuisance

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