Latitude 5410 CPU crackling sound

Dear @CS_Duck 

I'm the owner of a Dell Latitude 5411 notebook with a I7-10850H CPU

The problem you are facing is the same problem i'm experiencing here.

What happens is that merely touching the touchpad is enough to trigger the CPU to go to max speed on all cores, this causes the motherboard / capacitors to be stressed by the load and this in term causes the 'coil-whine' we are both experiencing. 

(Although i'm only seeing this under Linux not Windows 10). 

I've currently got a case open with Dell regarding this issue, my suggestion is that you contact Dell and open a case as well.


Regards,
Ruben

Dear Ruben,

good to know that I'm not the only one having this problem. You're explanation exactly matches my observations.
Unfortunately, I only used Windows on the first boot and then directly replaced it with Linux, so I can't really say if the problem is bigger on Linux than on Windows. But definitely, there was some noise on Windows too.

I also called the support and asked them to mention this problem to the technical department. My hope is that this can be fixed using an UEFI update. So I wanted to check this possibility first with them instead of requesting an exchange motherboard/CPU as I don't think this would fix the problem.

It'd be really great if you could let me know if you have news from dell!

Regards,
Benedikt

It seems that you are facing a throttling issue.

And that is causing short-circuit like thing in the MotherBoard.

You should take the laptop to the Dell Service center and get it checked.

I feel like the laptop may just explode all of a sudden.

Dear @CS_Duck, et al,

After taking this up with Dell ProSupport I've learned that although Dell sells these laptops in the US (and the models in question [Latitude 5410 / 5411] are certified for use with Ubuntu by Canonical), support for this models when it comes to (Ubuntu) Linux is a community effort and thus there isn't much Dell ProSupport can or will do.

Mitigating the issue:
I can say however that if you disable Intel Speedshift in the UEFI/BIOS configuration menu (press F2 at startup before the OS boots) you can find the option under the "Power Management" Tab in the UEFI/BIOS menu, the problem is no longer their.

Thanks for contacting the support and the information!

Unfortunately, for me this happened with Windows 10 as well and disabling SpeedShift did not cure the problem at all. The only way to silence the machine is to limit it to about 1.0 GHz.

My current workaround are two scripts, perf and pwr, the former sets the HWP performance hint to "power", corresponding to <= 1.0 GHz, the latter sets it to "balance_performance". This way I can accomodate for working in silent environments (at horrible speed) and when I need performance. It's a shame that I have to do this, but at least I can work in silence now.

Hello, I haven't received the Service tag or Express Service Code yet. Could you share any of them in the text format so that I can assist you with your query?

@CS_Duck
I don't know the details regarding the warranty of your machine, but if you have this issue happening under Windows-10, you should really push Dell to open a case for this and have them resolve this issue in the firmware op the laptop.

I mean the only reason Dell didn't chase this issue further for my Latitude 5411 is that i can't reproduce the issue under Windows.

All the best.
Ruben

Your PC has coil whine. Typical of dell laptops, prob best to replace your motherboard

Hello. It seems to be at least one of the coil. I have/had in on Dell 5411 (maxed out woth nVidia GPU and 6 core i7 cpu). The problem was really bad on Windows up to 2022, but was mitigated (but not eliminated) with some updates. It is almost gone now.

I am happy to report, that on RHEL9 with Gnome desktop it is also noticeably better. I also was able to mitigate it farther by installing cpufreq from Gnome Extensions page. I can now downscale cpu performance (which OS can raise automatically if it needs to) to 4 threads, effectively dropping coil noise even more down.

It is really unfortunate, because on Linux this laptop rarely use fan, making it extremely cool and quiet. So the only noise it produces are those coils. If not for those obvious design mistake, this would be an incredible workstation. Now it is just another Dell.

I hope You can make use of this. Good luck.