Enable CPU fan always on

Posted by Gundars Meness on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Gundars Meness
Published on 2013-08-02T15:19:41Z Indexed on 2013/08/02 15:42 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 380

Filed under:

laptop

|

cpu

|

fan

|

cooling

|

overheating

I am using 3 years old overheating laptop and I want my CPU fan to be spinning 24/7 regardless of the consequences. How to make it spin?

The problem is that CPU & GPU heats up to 68°C (154 F) right after boot and never goes down, because CPU fan is not spinning full throttle. It starts spinning faster when temperature goes over 70°C and stops when it reaches seventy again. When doing heavy work on databases, it gets from 70 to 90 in no-time and automatically powers off. Bios does not contain any "fan spin 100%" options, just "spin slowly all the time" and "auto" which is more useless than the first one since my fan doesn't have pwm wire.

Currently I'm solving this with cooling stand (3x5V), but it isn't much of a help. I would rather use the CPU fan since it is the only fan directly responsible for cooling down CPU/GPU.

But how to make it spin 100% all the time? Should I attach it's red power wire to motherboard to get constant 5V (is there such option?), or is there an option to control it via software?

Laptop: Samsung R528 2.3 GHz Intel i3 with Nvidia GeForce 310M
Bios: Phoenix 03KT.M003.20100622.KSJ (and that is latest update)
OS: Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS with 3.2.0.51 kernel
CPU fan: Image/Description Has 5V 0,4A and only 3 pins, no pwm.

P.S. Yes, I did clean everything with alcohol, freed the air vents, changed thermal paste etc; that reduced temperature by 4 degrees.

© Super User or respective owner

Related posts about laptop

Why does my laptop resume immediately after suspend?

as seen on Ask Ubuntu - Search for 'Ask Ubuntu'
I seem to be having some problem with suspend mode. Every time I try to suspend my laptop, it just locks the screen. Or maybe it successfully suspends just to resume only an instant after. What could cause such a behaviour? I'm running 32-bit Ubuntu 12.04 with the 3.2.0-25 kernel on a HP dv5-1178er… >>> More
Use laptop A's LCD as secondary monitor for laptop B

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
I have a working laptop (laptop A), but am interested in using the laptop's LCD as a secondary monitor for my main laptop (laptop B)...is there a way to do this via software or cabling without modifying laptop A? OS's are Windows XP SP3 and Windows 7. >>> More
Charging a laptop battery, without a laptop.

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
I have an old-ish laptop that only works on AC power because the battery is old and no longer holds a charge. I live in Christchurch New Zealand where there has recently been a number of very large earthquakes. During one of these earthquakes my laptop was thrown from my desk to the floor and now… >>> More
Aluminum Laptop Cases vs Leather Laptop Cases

as seen on Article City - Search for 'Article City'
Both aluminum and leather have been known for their excellent qualities in the world of business, travel and even fashion; but when it comes to choosing one, there are certain qualities that put alum... [Author: Shannon Hilson - Computers and Internet - March 23, 2010] >>> More
How to compare old laptop to new laptop?

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
I hope this question doesn't get closed at once :) I have an old laptop, a Compaq NC4200, which is going its final laps around the track these days. Battery is dead, and everything kinda runs slow. It also has only 1GB of memory, and even though I don't know if it can take more, I probably wouldn't… >>> More

Related posts about cpu

Speedstep and Intel x5570?

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
Hi, My new server has 2 x X5570 CPUs. Now here is the output of grep -i hz /proc/cpuinfo model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5570 @ 2.93GHz cpu MHz : 1600.231 model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5570 @ 2.93GHz cpu MHz : 1600.231 model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU … >>> More
VMware ESXi - varying CPU time (CPU reservation)

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
Hello! I'm running FreeBSD 7.2 under VMware ESXi 3.5. Host has 2 physical CPUs and the BSD box is currently the only running VM. Only one virtual CPU is assigned to the VM. When measuring CPU time of a specific program, I get very different results from time to time. Processor usage is reported… >>> More
How to calculate CPU % based on raw CPU ticks in SNMP

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
According to http://net-snmp.sourceforge.net/docs/mibs/ucdavis.html#scalar_notcurrent ssCpuUser, ssCpuSystem, ssCpuIdle, etc are deprecated in favor of the raw variants (ssCpuRawUser, etc). The former values (which don't cover things like nice, wait, kernel, interrupt, etc) returned a percentage… >>> More
disparity between `top`'s given CPU % and process CPU usage total

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
I've noticed that there are sometimes (large) differences between the reported total CPU usage and a summation of the per-process CPU utilization given by apps like top and wmtop. As an example: I recently ran a git filter-branch --index-filter on a fairly large repo, with the index-filter command… >>> More
How to read oom-killer syslog messages?

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
I have a Ubuntu 12.04 server which sometimes dies completely - no SSH, no ping, nothing until it is physically rebooted. After the reboot, I see in syslog that the oom-killer killed, well, pretty much everything. There's a lot of detailed memory usage information in them. How do I read these logs… >>> More