New XPS Fan Noise

We tried reaching you on a private message asking for the Service Tag number to ascertain the warranty but did not receive a response. Please feel free to reply to the private message whenever you are available.

Hi, Unfortunately excessive fan noise is standard on almost all Dell Laptops, Its a known issue with 1000s of posts discussing this. We bought bought a brand new Dell Inspiron 16 Plus to give to our son to use for school as a Christmas present and when he unboxed it and turned it on it was immediately apparent the fan noise is so disturbing that using this in a classroom or office is just not possible. Dell would not let us send this back or exchange it for something more quiet as it was after 14 days from purchase (as this was a Christmas present its been wrapped up for more than 2 weeks and Dell as usual dont care about customers so no understanding regarding this). We did log several cases with Dell support and only got the same copy paste answers from the same script, i.e please clean the vents etc (good advice for a brand new never used laptop).. Anyway our son is not allowed by his school to use this machine due to noise so now its just laying in a wardrobe never to be used again and we are £1100 out of pocket. I would advice everyone to stay away from Dell and Dell support as you will not find more incompetent people anywhere. 

Not sure why you're asking about service tags, so I ignored it.  I'm asking about current models not about my old computer. Which works fine but the fan is always running at a low hum whenever it's plugged in and running.  I've done enough research to know that excessive fan noise is a long standing Dell XPS problem (Tommy's comment below confirming it's not just XPS); I am/was hoping it's been fixed so I can buy a new model.  I would really love having a 17" 4k screen, faster processing, USB only charging (i never use the heavy stock power brick), more space, etc.  But it's really annoying to be in a quiet room with the fan running on a near idle computer.

The cause of the fan noise and overheating CPU is an issue with HP and Lenovo, though I think the latter has solved the issue with an IdeaPad 5 I bought middle of last year. It can be triggered by charging the battery or running viruscans; it's due to the CPU throttling up.

You can solve the problem by going into Dell's Thermal Management and selecting COOL or QUIET setting. The problem is this locks down the CPU to it's lowest clock, so system performance is adversely affected. The same effect can be achieved by going into the BIOS and turning off TURBO BOOST on the CPU.

Dell should be aware of this problem because what I revealed above was in a recent post of mine on this forum I did a month ago. To regain performance I have been experimenting on the OPTIMIZE setting but I still get periods of CPU overheating where temps spike to 100 C! This happens when the CPU needs to run at max clock. I tried keeping the XPS plugged into the charger, figuring once it is at full charge, no more overheating can take place. Nope, still get spikes and the fan noise, although average temps are around 55-60 C (get HWINFO to monitor your temps whenever your computer is on).

The issue may be inherent in the 7th-10th gen Intel CPUs. My Lenovo IdeaPad 5 has an 11th gen and does not have the overheat problem, so can't speak for the 9th-10th gen. My XPS 13 has an 8th gen Intel.

Hi, the issue with fan noise on various Dell Models XPS and Inspiron models is not solved by using Dells Thermal Management Software or changing the setting from the Bios to COOL. Changing this setting is not the same as turning off Turbo Boost and makes very little difference in term of fan noise or laptop performance. I have tested this myself on several models including the  Inspiron 16 Plus i7-11800H and you can also view test regarding this on YouTube or other outlets. Disabling Turbo boost will help the issue (not changing the setting to Quite in Dell Power Manager or Bios) however disabling turbo boost will lock the CPU to its lowest setting so the performance will be reduced by over 50% and your laptop will perform significantly worse than a laptop with a much cheaper CPU. Also you should not listen to any of Dells support engineers as I have it in writing form them that disabling Turbo boost does not effect the performance but would only make the laptop run cooler which is of course a total lie and I was surprised when they offered me this as a solution combining with telling me it would not effect laptop performance that just shows how incompetent they are overall. Fan noise issue is not related to CPU Generation but how the cooling system in the actual machine is designed and how to fan curve is implemented. On my Inspiron 16 Plus which is an i7-11800H with a RTX 3060 the only way to get it to somewhat a comfortable noise level is to disable the RTX 3060 GPU and also Turn off Turbo Boost and by doing this you can use normal office applications such as word, outlook and PowerPoint but still if you start streaming some YouTube the fan noise will still get very loud. I have measured the sound with a Decibel meter and its constantly around 55db (30-35db is generally considered acceptable for a laptop)

Of course the problem with the COOL setting (an turning off TURBO BOOST in the BIOS) is the laptop is ridiculously slow and laggy. It's like the laptop has a Pentium III CPU. Sometimes when I boot into Windows the desktop icons take several seconds to show up. Opening up programs is slow and laggy, as well as installing software updates. Streaming will have buffering issues. On my Dell, the 8th Gen CPU is locked at 1.8 GHZ when it has the capability of hitting 4.1 when boosted. This kind of subpar performance is totally unacceptable for a 4-core laptop purchased in 2018.

Also if you have a gaming video card, then yes, the fans will run when it is stressed out because they cool the CPU and GPU. But this fan noise issue and overheating of the CPU occurs to those of us that do not have a gaming laptop which is using the integrated Intel Iris graphics card (although my Lenovo IdeaPad 5 does have a Geforce MX450).

I can tell you that on an XPS 13 9360, the issue is COMPLETELY solved by using the COOL setting. The CPU does not get to 90-100C, which of course causes he fans to run noisily. This has an 8th Gen Intel CPU. You need to stress test the CPU by running a viruscan, and/or by charging the battery.

There is no excuse for an i7-11800H laptop to have this issue, as I have a Lenovo IdeaPad 5 with the same CPU. I bought it mid-2021. I have tested this laptop by running a viruscan at the same time as charging the battery, and the temps rise from 37-45C at idle, to maybe 55-65C, at which there is some fan noise, but nothing really loud. Lenovo has solved the issue without any extreme cooling settings in their Thermal Management software, or resorting to BIOS settings. There is no excuse for a Dell at this point in time, with the 11th Gen CPUs, to still have this issue.

Just FYI you don’t stress test a CPU by running a virus scanner or by charging the battery that’s just silly. Most CPUs will not even run at 20% when running a virus scan.  You use a stress-test tool such as Prime95 or burn in test or similar. Fans shouldn’t even be running if all you do is running a virus scan or charge your battery

It is basically just due to poor design. 

I had a £3000 precision laptop which was very loud and the fan was constantly on.

if dell bothered to spend money on areas which won’t look good on paper but would vastly improve the user experience, then I am sure even they could fix it.

I have used Razer’s 13in ultra portable laptop but it was very quiet.

I hate Apple products but right now, if you want (decent) performance AND low noise, i.e. high efficiency, then the only solution is the MacBook Air with the M1:chip.

I've just bought a New XPS 13, and the problem is there, plus a scratching noise from (probably) the CPU.

Same here, but also when it's plugged in and doing pretty much nothing (CPU at 20%) and/or when sleeping..

Although this might be a late reply, but I thought I will share.

I've been in exact same shoes as you when I started using XPS 9500. The fan just won't stop, even during basic browsing it would fire up.

I literally opened and closed the laptop 100 times to find a sweet spot to install thermal pads on heat sink so that the heat gets spread from heat sink to the laptop's metal back panel. It did help, but not significantly. I resorted to using Hwinfo's fan control to have my own custom fan curve.

What I learned is that the CPU remains in throttled state viz. it keeps processing at 4GHz+ speed even in idle state. That processing speed bumps up the heat instantly - even with insignificant load.

After some fine tuning with Power Options and changing the throttle threshold, I managed to make the laptop work in lower frequencies for most part. Now the frequency stays at 1.5 to 2.5GHz during idling and for any instant load it goes upto 4.7GHz but scales back to aforementioned range once the load is removed. With this change, the temperate barely rises during standard usage and fan kicks in much less often.

CPU's governor plays a key role in how hot it runs and how much power it consumes. Current governor (applicable to linux) that I have is making XPS 9500 run way efficiently than its default factory settings.