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I have a self-assembled computer based on a barebone (a Shuttle XPC). Its fans are running at a very high level even under moderate load, and even higher (and louder) if there's work to be done, especially USB related.

This makes me suspect that something about the machine's setup is imperfect, and I'm looking for hints about how to diagnose this systematically.

Some data:

  • The barebone comes with a system fan and a processor fan. The system fan is set at a fixed speed. The processor fan is dynamic. The processor fan seems to be the main problem.

  • System temperatures always seem normal: 41 °C system, 51 °C CPU.

  • I'm running Windows 7 and have already confirmed there are no intensive background processes running.

  • I can see occasional CPU peaks up to 90% when navigating to a Youtube window. That makes me wonder whether this is normal, on a 3 GHz dual-core system with 6 gigabytes of RAM - can the (rather weak) graphics card be causing bottlenecks?

I guess the first step will be to look for updated mainboard drivers from the barebone manufacturer - I'll do that in a second. I'd appreciate any further guidance in how to find out what is causing the load.

Hennes
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Pekka
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1 Answers1

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Some BIOSes have options to manage the fans, and some motherboards can control the fans using software. To my knowledge YouTube doesnt take advantage of a GPU yet, and when it does it's going to rely on Flash v. 10 or later, so if you don't have Flash 10 or later, I'm pretty sure that's not the issue.

41 °C is pretty good for regular use; fans shouldn't be going wild like that.

Oh and some motherboards can only control one fan or two so, try connecting the fan in another port if the motherboard has it.

Peter Mortensen
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Guillermo
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