Brand New 5511 - Loud Fan Noise, Tons of Heat, just sitting on BIOS screen doing nothing.

Load into windows and run all updates using the dell command update software. I bet the bios and some firmware needs to be updated

I'll give that a try but so far I'm less than thrilled with this brand new laptop being in essence broken out of the box. Do you have a 5511 with the same problem or are you just offering general advice?

I get what you're saying but there's something incredibly wrong here if 5511's require day 1 firmware updates to prevent their fans from going full blast right out of the box. 

I dont have this laptop but I have other latitudes at work I manage along with optiplex desktops. I usually reimage my computers with a fresh install of windows to get rid of the dell .

I am in these forums more now since I am in the market for a new laptop but seems the new dells have thermal issues (namely the 7410, 7400, 7300).

The 5511s definitely run hot. The fan noises have calmed down, but when they're just sitting on a desk running basically nothing but Windows, there's a ton of hot air blowing out. If you lift up the laptop, the wood under the desk is more than warm, it's borderline hot.

There's a definite issue here with heat and the 5511s. I haven't found any fix for it yet.

Again I'm not rendering 3D graphics or playing MS Flight Sim 2020 on this thing. It's just sitting on the Windows desktop with the usual Office apps and whatnot installed, utilizing oh maybe 9% CPU.

I just got a new 5511 and have the same issue even with the 1.3.1 BIOS update and balanced cooling policy.

I am running Ubuntu 20.04 and the Nvidia proprietary driver.

When I do a Linux build, all the cores hit 100C and the CPU is throttled to a slower speed.

It seems the CPU just puts out too much heat.

Excess heat can cause the fans to run faster and continuously which can potentially damage internal components and reduce the performance of the PC. Your PC may contain one or more fans to keep the internal components cool. Under normal working conditions, it is normal for a PC to generate a fair amount of heat and become warm to touch depending on usage. Fans that continue to spin quickly and make abnormally loud noises might indicate a problem.

Common causes for fans not working, abnormal or loud fan noise, overheating:

• Fans or air vents that are obstructed
• Dust accumulation on vents or fans
• Not enough ventilation
• Physical damage
• Out-of-date BIOS and device drivers

@nerdindenial Thank you! That is exactly the test I was hoping someone would be able to run. It takes away the Windows aspect of things if you are just letting a fully updated BIOS and brand new 5511 simply sit on Linux doing nothing and the fans and CPU are ramped up.

I had a suspicion the 5511s would be loud and hot because of the processor and your test confirmed that there's nothing I can do about it because it's not some Windows power setting nor some hidden BIOS option. I appreciate it!

To clarify, my 5511 laptop gets hot when building a Linux distro using the Yocto distribution builder. This is an enormous computational and I/O task that drives the CPU cores to 100C with TurboBoost enabled and 80C with TurboBoost disabled. But I have a bigger problem now - twice when I have been running the system it has suddenly died hard and refused to power back on unless I take the bottom cover off and disconnect and reconnect the battery. The second time it died I found that if I held down the power button for 25 seconds, released it, and momentarily pressed the power button again it would start up (the usual 5 second button press does NOT work). Dell support wants me to install Windows 10 on it and try to reproduce the problem on Windows. I don't really see how Ubuntu can cause this problem, since it seems to be some sort of motherboard power controller issue.

Why is this marked as solved? I don't see any solution here.

I have exactly the same issue with a completely new 5511.

CPU temperature is not so high, max. 65°C. However, the fan is running almonst constantly at 4500 RPM. The noise is driving me crazy, I have to work with earplugs.

I tried to set the power profile in the bios to "Quiet". That decreases the fan noise, however, just opening the browser takes 10 seconds, i.e. CPU performance is just intolerable bad. So currently I'm using the profile "Optimized" again.

Here's the output of "sensors"

dell_smm-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
fan1: 4493 RPM

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Package id 0: +65.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0: +56.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1: +52.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 2: +65.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 3: +54.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 4: +53.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 5: +53.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

Don't know why it was marked as Solved. I un-marked it as Solved.

The only thing I have to add is that the fan noise has calmed down for my users over the past few weeks. Not sure if there was a BIOS update or something else that happened, but I asked my users with 5511s about it and they confirmed that it was loud for a few days when they first got it, but now it's no louder than their other laptops.

@pipppoo Are you running the laptop docked to a WD19TB or other dock?

@AdrianG001 We are all well aware of how CPU load, heat, and fans work. This is a brand new laptop clearly showing a design defect of some sort, and your copy/paste advice about fans and heat makes me roll my eyes. It is not helpful at all given the context of this post and the relatively high end troubleshooting we've already done. In the future I suggest you take a more time actually reading the content of technical posts like this before copy/pasting generic advice which do little but infuriate people who come to the thread looking for an answer.

Welcome everyone.

I am not sure if its possible but has anyone tried Intel Dynamic Tuning???

Best regards,

U2

I was able to solve the noise issue. The fan does not run on startup at all:

[0][~]: sensors
dell_smm-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
fan1: 0 RPM

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Package id 0: +42.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0: +40.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1: +40.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 2: +42.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 3: +40.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 4: +40.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 5: +39.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

Even in case of high cpu load the fan speed does not exceed 3400 rpm, which is absolutely ok in terms of noise.

However, I don't know exactly how I solved it as I made a few things at the same time:

1) Update of bios to latest version (Latitude_5X11_Precision_3551_1.4.3.exe)

2) I switched from the nvidia graphics to the intel graphics (run sudo nvidia-settings to do so)

3) I removed three docker images which were running constantly in the background

Hope this helps.

I had the same issue with my new dell 5511. Constantly heating as air heater or proffessional overloaded noisy rack-mounted server but cpu only 2-5%. I was affraid about electric bills, summer period, my palms and fire in the house. So can't reccomend this model to people who suffer a failure of nerve
After I downloaded and used the Dell Command | Update the issue luckily was over. "Dell command update" updated all drivers to the newest version (February 2021) but bios was untouched (i don't have password) - the bios version is: 1.2.15. After a few days I noticed that headphones wasn't detected. So I found on the dell forum that uninstalling Realtek driver would be the solusion. And in fact it helped, the headphones was detected afer plug in using mini jack connector. Unfortunately after uninstalling Realtek driver, my laptop started to heat and make noise again. So I installed the Realtek driver (6.0.9098.1) using "Dell Command | Update" and now Windows 10 detects headphones and laptop works without overheating and without making noise.

Same issue with my brand new business laptop (Lattitude 5511 MLK XCTO).

Our IT departement had contact with Dell as more have fan/heat issues but no solution. Lots of Fan noice and lots of heat. Fan is positioned on left side (previously at backside) and Is prettig annoying and is annoying to left hand. IT department suggested wireless keyboard to avoid the heat issue to hand.

I really don’t understand why this happens and is tolerated by our IT department and Dell gets away with it.

terrible