Latitude E5430 - Problems with fan control

I took the screenshot after the fan was turned ON for about 20 seconds.

My screenshot after the fan was turned ON.

My readings.

Fan is off (using fn+z) - it was on for about an hour, I turned it off and made the screenshot.

I will attach a second picture when it turns on again.

A

And now it's on:

Thanks for the screen shots everyone. If you haven't posted a screen shot of HWiNFO32 and you feel that the fan is kicking on too soon and staying on too long please do so.  So far engineering hasn't seen anything glaringly wrong with the temps.  I will keep all of you up to date with any news from engineering.

TB

What is this Fn+z shortkey  ? I tried it and FAN didn't turn off or may be is it the Fn+"sleep" and then awake the machine ?

Sometimes combination of Fn+Z on laptop keyboard turns the fan off. For a couple of minutes unfortunately :-(

Sorry for my bad English.

I think the problem in PCH Temperature. It is too high in comparison with other components temperature. Cooling system tries to reduce PCH temperature to a certain level, but PCH temperature decreases very very slowly. In my case, after ~2 hours full idle laptop, fan turn off when CPU temperature at 33C and PCH temperature at 52C. I think the cooling system can not effectively cool the PCH(Platform Controller Hub). I see photo of motherboard in internet and I can not see any thermal connection the PCH chip to radiator of cooling system. It seems to PCH chip engineers did not provide active cooling. I noticed that sometimes the PCH chip temperature it attains 69C. I think summer temperature chip will be much more.

Engineered fail?

And then question is... which temp sensor is used to decide if FAN has to be turned on ? is it PCH ?

Same problem here with my E6430 @i5-3320m. It's annoying!

Here is the latest news that I have received from engineering.

We are aware many of you have concerns about your Latitude E5430 because the fan keeps spinning much of the time.  This behavior is actually by design and here is why.

Fan activity has traditionally been governed by thermal sensors which measure temperature fluctuations of processors.  However, the new Intel CPU turbo boost makes that impractical.  It’s not proper to use a CPU temperature sensor to drive the fan activity because it will go up and down rapidly while CPU turbo is working.  Instead, we now use the skin temperature sensor.  This drives the fan activity at idle or under moderate loading in order to keep the fan state from changing too frequently.  We also do this to ensure the skin temperature of this model stays low. So we have set the trip point of fan-off at relatively low skin sensor temperature.

We decided this was the best design choice to give optimal performance of the system and surface comfort.  We do realize though from your comments that you may not prefer the fan run as much as it does.  We are currently looking at ways to minimize the fan runtime in order to give you the experience you prefer.  This may take time to achieve that and still maintain our standards of optimal performance.  We will keep you informed as we continue to examine potential changes.”

So what they are saying is that the system is working as designed, so they don't suggest any services at this time.  They are looking into editing the BIOS to make sure that the operating temperatures of the system stay in the correct range while keeping the fan noise at a manageable level.  I am still expecting a BIOS revision sometime soon, but I wanted to let you know where engineering is at now.

TB

Thank you for keeping us informed.

That is just strange. I had many laptops (also using Turbo Boost technology) and none of them was working in such a strange way. I cannot agree that there is no other possibility of keeping the temperature low. Imagine:

- you turn the laptop on (in air conditioned room)

- after 10 minutes the fan turns on and spinns at 2800 RPM (almost maximum speed)

- it stays like this for 7-8 hours.

Something is really wrong. I hope "Dell engineering" can do better than this.

Hello,

the new Intel CPU turbo boost makes that impractical.  It’s not proper to use a CPU temperature sensor to drive the fan activity because it will go up and down rapidly while CPU turbo is working.

Does this mean that if Turbo Boost is disabled, the fan will work as expected (silent during idling)? Did anyone check this claim? Somehow I feel that Turbo Boost is getting the blame here undeservingly.

Thanks for keeping us informed, Terry.

I'm also not really happy with that statement because:

a) I've had many TurboBoost-devices, none of them had this issue.

b) Latitude E6430 series does not have this issue (from what I've read), while being quite similar to our devices (looking at BIOS update cycle, BIOS changes, release date of the product). So I suppose that you are using the skin temperature sensor on this device series too, where it does lead to any issue.

c) I'm encountering this issue with a E5430 with a i3, which does not support TurboBoost

d (!!)) You are arguing that the fan speed is based on the values that the skin temperature sensor reports. If this is so, why does the fan not turn back on instantly if you suspend your device (showing the sympthom of having the fan running all time) and wake it up again. In the time you are suspending and resuming, the temperature delta is 1C at best.

Hope that the engineers will get it tweaked so it runs correctly.

As far as I know the laptops (with same CPU and other components) from other manufacturers do not have this problem.  Seems engineers of these manufacturers solved the issue with the TurboBoost. When I buying E5430 I did not expect that the fan will run continuously.