I have an Acer Power FH series desktop, 3 Ghz Pentium D, 1 GB RAM, and 2x160GB SATA Hd’s dual booting XP and OpenSuse.
Sensors is installed and working with the dynamic cpu speed set. My problem is that the speed on the CPU fan does not change with system load the way it does in XP. This leads to the processor temp heading for 120F when doing something demanding on the system, like transcoding sound and video files, or anything that makes the system work hard. Normal things like web browsing, email, and the like don’t cause the cpu temp to go up that much.
What steps would I need to take to troubleshoot this?
I’ve tried Google and Forum searches and didn’t come up with much except laptops, and many of those threads were 1 or 2 years old.
120F=49C isn’t extremely hot, although I’d want my processor to run cooler if possible. Do you have a “cool-'n-quiet” or other such option in BIOS? That may need to be enabled.
You might not want to do this, but if you have a 3-pin fan connector, if you only hook up the power pins and not the speed control pin, it will run full throttle. Although this will make it noisier, it will keep your CPU as cool as possible. The thing is, you probably don’t want your fan running full throttle when it doesn’t have to.
Checked the BIOS and all it lists is a “Smart Fan Control” and the option to turn it on or off. The system is really quiet, even with the 2 hd’s running. Both the cpu and system fan run right around 1000 rpm or so, but don’t speed up when the temp rises as they do in Windows.
The option of running the fans full throttle WILL bring the processor temp down, but I can’t hear myself think. The system sounds rather like a turboprop aircraft taxiing.
I may have found part of a solution, but need time to chase it down. There’s a script called pwconfig that’s part of the lm-sensors package that may help. Running the test portion showed that I can change the fan speeds thru software, so that’s the good news. Now I have to do some more reading to see what’s needed to make it work.
I normally use a program called speedfan to do this in Windows, but I don’t use XP as much now that our company has upgraded 1 of 2 apps that won’t run in Wine. Still Speedfan is good for finding where all the monitor chips, fans, etc. are at.
Did some more testing and came up with something rather interesting. The fwconfig script used to test your hardware gets some strange results. The script is supposed to stop the system fans one at a time for about 5 seconds then turn them back on. On my system the fans don’t stop - they go to full throttle! The cpu fans slows back down to its normal 1100 rpm or so, but the case fan doesn’t start again. Period. The only was to get the case fan back up is to reboot the machine.
Oh well, guess I’m leaving well enough alone after sending the report to the lm-sensors folks.
The system sounds rather like a turboprop aircraft taxiing.