Linux Mint 16 on T430s - Fan always on / noisy

[laptop_overthinker]

Hi,

I recently purchased a new T430s-2356 with the Intel i-5 3320M CPU and an additional discrete nVidia NVS 5200M GPU.
After fully charging the battery and testing that the network card / display are functioning correctly, I plugged in my Linux Mint 16 (with Cinnamon) 64-bit live USB and examined its compatibility. Hardware seemed to run fine (I even started installing Bumblebee but then decided that it might not be the best idea to toy with drivers while booting from a USB), and I proceeded to install Mint, leaving only 14GB out of my 500GB disk for the factory reset partition (preinstalled).

Things are running smoothly (Bumblebee+Primus are working as they shouldd, according to glxgears), except that the fan is constantly on, and the computer seems to generally be producing more noise than it should, although I haven't really put it to stress (only web-browsed a bit). Other people running Mint / Ubuntu on this model are reporting that their fan rarely turns on, which makes me wonder if I'm doing something wrong.

I considered booting with the integrated GPU only (via BIOS), but I don't know if its a good idea with Bumblebee already installed (if it will actually solve the problem at all), or installing some monitoring tools and/or Thinkfan to try and get a better understanding of the situation (but I'm not really knowledgeable with hardware so I'd rather not screw things up more than they already are).
Does anyone have a better idea? Is there a package / driver that I'm unaware of?

Thanks a lot!

[kony]

I use T430 with Mint 15 Xfce (same CPU, no discrete GPU), the fan rarely turns on except when I play games, I doubt it's the Nvidia GPU's fault, unless you didn't install proprietary drivers (My AMD on another laptop would always get hot and run fan if without AMD's proprietary drivers as well). It could be also desktop environment's fault, as Cinammon, KDE and Gnome 3 are GPU demanding. When I run KDE on my older laptop, it was also running hot until I installed a different DE.

If you did install the drivers, check if the temperature is fine or is your CPU running hot. In the terminal write:

sensors

and see the output. Let me know how high your temperature is.