I installed SpeedFan and checked the option for Dell support.
I disabled thermal control via Shift+FN+15324 then FN+R. This worked. However, when I restart the computer, it re-enables itself again. :emotion-12:
It works great up until that point. I love being able to control the fan!!!!! Com'on Dell. Come out with a useful piece of software.
I do have my laptop docked. Actually, I have a dock at work without an extra monitor (was working great) then I come home to my other dock and a 27" monitor and I have the problems. I check the bios settings and saw that thermal control was reenabled. I tried disabling and restarting. Could not get Speedfan to work like it was however. Not actively controlling the fan. not sure if this has to do with the separate monitor?
There does not seem to be a good solution for this. Maybe reverting to an older bios to see if the setting would stick after a restart. Wondering if some Dell software is making changes to the bios like Dell System Detect.
I did just learn something interesting. The fan only has two speeds when using Speedfan.
2500 rpm when power hits 35% to 69%
4900 rpm when power hits 70% or greater (Power is a Speedfan setting. For me it is Pwm1.)
At first I thought the fan only had two speeds. But then I went in the bios and adjusted the speed of the fan there. It is continuously variable. I can set it to 3000 rpm, then 3200 rpm and I can hear the subtle change in fan noise.
It seems however, that all Dells jump from a low speed to a high speed without feathering medium speeds. Thus, you hear a sudden burst in fan speed just because you opened a new window.
This is interesting: http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/manual31/index.html#temp confirms the low and high speed setting. There is a "Enable hardware sensor support" setting that will allow for 64 speed levels but seems there could be conflicts here.
FYI, my computer is fine. processor is at 40C or less and GPU at 50C. Clean between the heat exchanger and the fan! You have to take the back plate off and remove the fan. Super easy on this laptop. Tons of dust there. They should make a removable screen. Should be done every two months if working in a dusty environment.
Judging from this Youtube video, our Bios looks identical.
If the F5 lock light is flashing when you do the Shift+FN+15324, maybe you can try some other FN+keys. Maybe they changed it. I saw somewhere it used to be FN+Z+R.
Can you do me a favor and monitor the fan rpm when performing tasks? Do you ever see it feather in a velocity or is it always off, low and high?
This seems to me like the issue for everyone. If Dell just offered 10 discrete steps between 1500-5000 rpm and the ability to a set rpm vs temp table for CPU and GPU then we would be all set. This is defined by the bios and is not hardware limited. For whatever reason, Dell simplifies cooling with two speeds only. It's like driving with a fool that slams the accelerator to the floor to go forward and then slams on the brake to stop. Ridiculous.
Would be great to get a Dell engineer involved here. Why do so many Dell owners seek out fan controllers?
I can monitor my fan speeding with the kernel module i8k and in normal operation mode it toggles from being off to about 81000 RPM (I think this is a wrong number, could be 8100 ) and when I do some work it heads up to 95000 RPM. So for me there are also only a few modes and it always starts with 81000 RPM which is quiet noisy.
My old Macbook Pro had the fan always running at barely hear-able 2500RPM and only fired when needed. This way the typical heat could be managed.
I think here is the problem with the Dell heat management. When the fan is off temperature raises and so the fan has to be powered on. As there is no real PWM here it always turns off and on.
I would love to have a better fan management here or at least the possibility to turn it completely off so I can manage it on myself.
81,000 and 95,000 RPM are not the correct speeds. This is clearly an error with the software trying to interpret the fan feedback. It is likely to be 0, 2500 and 5000 rpm. I can manually adjust my fan to 3,200 rpm and it is barely audible. Dell likely has a reason for limiting the fan to 2 speeds but is not clear to me.
I had to set my laptop back to the Dell bios thermal control = Enabled due to flaky-ness of the other way I was doing it. Too much micro management for me. If Dell just offered a way to control this in the Bios we would be all set.
I find it highly unlikely that the new bios you are updating to will have any thermal control enhancements. Dell just does not care about this issue. To them, it is not broken, so why fix it (computer get really hot, turn fan on high).
Don't know if you guys have seen but I have an E5440 and have been moaning about similar problems for months. Despite putting a lot of time and effort into quantifying and diagnosing the problem I still haven't had a single response from Dell:
The fan might be off for short periods but otherwise droning on at 3,000rpm for hours and hours... The only way to stop it is leave the machine completely idle for 10 minutes. Absolutely ridiculous behaviour for a business laptop that might be in use for 8+ hours a day.
I'd also love to be able to override the BIOS with SpeedFan but it won't give up control.
Has anyone tried contacting Terry directly and had a response?
I'm now going down the route of raising it as a technical support issue. So far the response is to run all the diagnostics stuff. Fair enough I guess but I suspect it will be hard to get them to accept engineering/design issues.
I don't really want to get into pointless motherboard swaps when I know two of my issues are BIOS bugs and another one is driver related.
I have a brand new (well, refurbished, from dellrefurbished.com) e6430, I really love the keyboard because it's the same as the Alienware and no other brand has the same layout, but sadly I am about to ask for an rma and return it. The cpu is between 50 and 60 C when idle, the fan is on most of the time at 2800 rpm when idle, and even when the fan is off there is a constant noise which I don't understand where it comes from because the unit has a SSD. This noise went away for only three times since I have it, and only for 5-10 seconds. I have been reading all the threads about overheating for the e6430, e6440, etc. and tried all the solutions I could but nothing helped. The "Quiet fan" power plan from Dell slightly reduces the rpm speed but does nothing to prevent overheating. The tech rep. I did troubleshooting with thinks that this may be normal behavior. I found several forum threads (some of which still unanswered) about the same issue only for the e6430, so they may be right...
EDIT: I thought this was an overheating issue, since that is how it is usually described in the forum threads here, but according to a thread on an external website it seems that the actual issue is that the Windows 7 power management options are not effective in this and other models...
SebastianH
35 Posts
0
January 26th, 2014 09:00
No one has an idea? The current behavior of the fan is really annoying in quiet places.
mkpryor
11 Posts
0
February 19th, 2014 22:00
I have a E6400 on Windows 8.1 with bios A34
I installed SpeedFan and checked the option for Dell support.
I disabled thermal control via Shift+FN+15324 then FN+R. This worked. However, when I restart the computer, it re-enables itself again. :emotion-12:
It works great up until that point. I love being able to control the fan!!!!! Com'on Dell. Come out with a useful piece of software.
I do have my laptop docked. Actually, I have a dock at work without an extra monitor (was working great) then I come home to my other dock and a 27" monitor and I have the problems. I check the bios settings and saw that thermal control was reenabled. I tried disabling and restarting. Could not get Speedfan to work like it was however. Not actively controlling the fan. not sure if this has to do with the separate monitor?
There does not seem to be a good solution for this. Maybe reverting to an older bios to see if the setting would stick after a restart. Wondering if some Dell software is making changes to the bios like Dell System Detect.
mkpryor
11 Posts
0
February 19th, 2014 22:00
I did just learn something interesting. The fan only has two speeds when using Speedfan.
2500 rpm when power hits 35% to 69%
4900 rpm when power hits 70% or greater (Power is a Speedfan setting. For me it is Pwm1.)
At first I thought the fan only had two speeds. But then I went in the bios and adjusted the speed of the fan there. It is continuously variable. I can set it to 3000 rpm, then 3200 rpm and I can hear the subtle change in fan noise.
It seems however, that all Dells jump from a low speed to a high speed without feathering medium speeds. Thus, you hear a sudden burst in fan speed just because you opened a new window.
This is interesting: http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/manual31/index.html#temp confirms the low and high speed setting. There is a "Enable hardware sensor support" setting that will allow for 64 speed levels but seems there could be conflicts here.
FYI, my computer is fine. processor is at 40C or less and GPU at 50C. Clean between the heat exchanger and the fan! You have to take the back plate off and remove the fan. Super easy on this laptop. Tons of dust there. They should make a removable screen. Should be done every two months if working in a dusty environment.
Mark
SebastianH
35 Posts
0
February 20th, 2014 00:00
Hi,
thanks for your information, so I am not alone.
Sadly the Shift+FN+15324 then FN+R trick does not work for me. Caps-Lock starts blinking after 15324 but FN+R does nothing.
So we all can just wait for a better BIOS which has an option to disable speed control.
Sebastian
SebastianH
35 Posts
0
February 20th, 2014 01:00
I already tried i8kfan but the problem is that it "fights" against the internal fan control of the BIOS. So it spins down and up and down and up...
I have a E6440 and I think that it is too new I just can hope for a BIOS update which lets me disable fan control.
mkpryor
11 Posts
0
February 20th, 2014 01:00
FYI, I updated my previous post with new info. It may be helpful.
Have you updated your bios to the latest version?
This looks like it could help you a bit: http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-latitude-vostro-precision/326397-downgrading-e6500-less-fan-noise.html
I may consider giving i8kfan a try http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/index.html but the e6400 is not listed on the compatibility list. However, this person did it http://cdiefer.proboards.com/thread/695/solution-series
cheers
mkpryor
11 Posts
0
February 20th, 2014 10:00
Judging from this Youtube video, our Bios looks identical.
If the F5 lock light is flashing when you do the Shift+FN+15324, maybe you can try some other FN+keys. Maybe they changed it. I saw somewhere it used to be FN+Z+R.
Can you do me a favor and monitor the fan rpm when performing tasks? Do you ever see it feather in a velocity or is it always off, low and high?
This seems to me like the issue for everyone. If Dell just offered 10 discrete steps between 1500-5000 rpm and the ability to a set rpm vs temp table for CPU and GPU then we would be all set. This is defined by the bios and is not hardware limited. For whatever reason, Dell simplifies cooling with two speeds only. It's like driving with a fool that slams the accelerator to the floor to go forward and then slams on the brake to stop. Ridiculous.
Would be great to get a Dell engineer involved here. Why do so many Dell owners seek out fan controllers?
SebastianH
35 Posts
0
February 25th, 2014 02:00
I tried other combinations but with no luck.
I can monitor my fan speeding with the kernel module i8k and in normal operation mode it toggles from being off to about 81000 RPM (I think this is a wrong number, could be 8100 ) and when I do some work it heads up to 95000 RPM. So for me there are also only a few modes and it always starts with 81000 RPM which is quiet noisy.
My old Macbook Pro had the fan always running at barely hear-able 2500RPM and only fired when needed. This way the typical heat could be managed.
I think here is the problem with the Dell heat management. When the fan is off temperature raises and so the fan has to be powered on. As there is no real PWM here it always turns off and on.
I would love to have a better fan management here or at least the possibility to turn it completely off so I can manage it on myself.
SebastianH
35 Posts
0
March 3rd, 2014 07:00
Dell just reelased a new BIOS update (A05) which I installed today. We will see if it helps...
http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/us/en/19/Product/latitude-e6440-laptop
mkpryor
11 Posts
0
March 3rd, 2014 10:00
81,000 and 95,000 RPM are not the correct speeds. This is clearly an error with the software trying to interpret the fan feedback. It is likely to be 0, 2500 and 5000 rpm. I can manually adjust my fan to 3,200 rpm and it is barely audible. Dell likely has a reason for limiting the fan to 2 speeds but is not clear to me.
I had to set my laptop back to the Dell bios thermal control = Enabled due to flaky-ness of the other way I was doing it. Too much micro management for me. If Dell just offered a way to control this in the Bios we would be all set.
I find it highly unlikely that the new bios you are updating to will have any thermal control enhancements. Dell just does not care about this issue. To them, it is not broken, so why fix it (computer get really hot, turn fan on high).
Mark
CurbedLarry
2 Intern
•
130 Posts
0
January 1st, 2015 08:00
Don't know if you guys have seen but I have an E5440 and have been moaning about similar problems for months. Despite putting a lot of time and effort into quantifying and diagnosing the problem I still haven't had a single response from Dell:
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/19593697
The previous E5430 model also received a lot of complaints, seemingly never resolved:
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/19480918
The fan might be off for short periods but otherwise droning on at 3,000rpm for hours and hours... The only way to stop it is leave the machine completely idle for 10 minutes. Absolutely ridiculous behaviour for a business laptop that might be in use for 8+ hours a day.
I'd also love to be able to override the BIOS with SpeedFan but it won't give up control.
Has anyone tried contacting Terry directly and had a response?
SebastianH
35 Posts
0
January 6th, 2015 11:00
Hi,
sadly I never heard back, too.
If you have any news, let me know!
CurbedLarry
2 Intern
•
130 Posts
0
January 7th, 2015 00:00
I'm now going down the route of raising it as a technical support issue. So far the response is to run all the diagnostics stuff. Fair enough I guess but I suspect it will be hard to get them to accept engineering/design issues.
I don't really want to get into pointless motherboard swaps when I know two of my issues are BIOS bugs and another one is driver related.
Have you tried raising it as a support issue?
SebastianH
35 Posts
0
January 7th, 2015 05:00
not yet
dale602
3 Posts
0
September 26th, 2015 11:00
I have a brand new (well, refurbished, from dellrefurbished.com) e6430, I really love the keyboard because it's the same as the Alienware and no other brand has the same layout, but sadly I am about to ask for an rma and return it. The cpu is between 50 and 60 C when idle, the fan is on most of the time at 2800 rpm when idle, and even when the fan is off there is a constant noise which I don't understand where it comes from because the unit has a SSD. This noise went away for only three times since I have it, and only for 5-10 seconds. I have been reading all the threads about overheating for the e6430, e6440, etc. and tried all the solutions I could but nothing helped. The "Quiet fan" power plan from Dell slightly reduces the rpm speed but does nothing to prevent overheating. The tech rep. I did troubleshooting with thinks that this may be normal behavior. I found several forum threads (some of which still unanswered) about the same issue only for the e6430, so they may be right...
EDIT: I thought this was an overheating issue, since that is how it is usually described in the forum threads here, but according to a thread on an external website it seems that the actual issue is that the Windows 7 power management options are not effective in this and other models...