1

My fans run very fast sometimes when I play media in Firefox (music, videos, video streams); sometimes even a notification sound from social media sites is enough. It does not always happen but it gets more and more frequent. The funny thing is that the CPU is not busy at all and the CPU temp is also fine when it happens. When I close the tab or Firefox the fans calm down after a minute or two.

Hardware and OS:

~ sudo sensors-detect
# sensors-detect version 3.6.0
# Board:  ASRock H77M 
# Kernel: 5.3.11-arch1-1 x86_64
# Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2310 CPU @ 2.90GHz (6/42/7)

CPU and fan are about 8, the motherboard about 4 years old. I already had the problem a year or so ago when I used Ubuntu on the same machine.

sensor-detect summary:

Driver `nct6775':
  * ISA bus, address 0x290
    Chip `Nuvoton NCT5573D/NCT5577D/NCT6776F Super IO Sensors' (confidence: 9)

Driver `coretemp':
  * Chip `Intel digital thermal sensor' (confidence: 9)

I ran pwmconfig but it was not even able to stop the fan. The full output of $ sensors and # pwmconfig when it's running very loud can be found here (all cores are at ~50°C but one fan is spinning at 3196 RPM while it's about at ~2100 RPM otherwise). While pwmconfig created a config file, it only set INTERVAL=10, other values are named but don't get a value, e.g. DEVPATH= which causes # fancontrol to stop.

How can I narrow the issue further down or what can I try to get better control of the fan?

Edit: While the CPU theoretically is able to run on board graphics, I'm using a NVIDIA GPU for that.

Edit2: I have 2 fans directly connected to the Motherboard, 1 on the CPU heatsink and one at the rear exhaust of the chassis. The GPU (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti) has 2 fans which are not the cause. The power supply has another fan. Also, all fans and the chassis itself are clean.

Turtle10000
  • 163

1 Answers1

2

I fixed the issue by setting the target CPU temperature to the maximum in the UEFI setup. They have already been higher than what the actual temperature was, but the fan kept blowing - setting them to the max (65°C) solved the problem.

Please note that high temperature can damage your hardware before messing with the hardware settings. In my case, a temperature of 80°C was considered high, so 65°C is still in a secure range.

Turtle10000
  • 163