I have a Dell XPS laptop which has a CPU fan on the left and a GPU fan on the right.
I noticed that in Opensuse 11 they switch on at regular intervals but mostly controlled by the bios. When the temps of CPU get arround 60°C and 65°C for the GPU they switch on until it cools down, then they go off until it heats up again and then it starts over.
I think they switch on too late and the laptop gets too hot but I can’t find a way to make suse switch on the fans and leave them on.
What makes you think your laptop gets too warm, because at most laptops the temperature regulations is totally controlled by the BIOS. Also, a modern CPU and GPU (newer than Intel Pentium 3) slows down or turns itself off when the temperature reaches a too high level.
I’d also like to say that 60 degrees C isn’t that high temperature, my own HP NC6400 cools down at 55-- and a GPU runs at higher temperature/is built for higher temperatures
As far as I know, I don’t think you can control the fans of most laptops at all. Anyway, I wouldn’t worry. I really think the manufacturer have tought about other operating systems other than Windows
I was concerned about the fact that the underside of the laptop got so hot you could hardly keep you finger on it.
Now I made some changes to the powermanagement settings in the sysconfig editor, set it to kernel and changed some options to throttling where this was not set and changed the kpowersave CPU scaling from Performance to Powersave and since then the fans are constantly on, the cpu remains at 40°C and the GPU does not raise higer than 51°C (I have a monitoring tool constantly open and the last hour it did not change while it did before and the laptop remains cool this time.
Well, I have to dig this one up again. I noticed again that opensuse 11 shuts down the fan speed of my laptop’s CPU and GPU fan as soon as it reached a reasonable low temperature.
But instead of keeping them running it shuts them down completely. On one side it keeps the laptop silent, but on the other hand the CPU and GPU temps start to raise and they go very high before the fans are switched on again.
And this process seems to go on over and over. I really would like to keep the two chips as cool as possile, I don’t care about the noise.
Is there a way, a command or a script or whatever to switch on the fans and keep them running until I run a script to stop them ?
My laptop is too expensive to kill. Windows Vista or XP don’t do this. As long as the temps are reasonably low it keeps running the fans at low speed to keep the temps down.
