E330 - anyone else having issues with the fan speed?

[quintana]

I am pretty happy with my E330 (i3 3110M, 4 GB RAM, 320GB HDD) which I received yesterday, but there's one thing that bothers me. The fan is running more than 80% of the time although I do nothing but some surfing, mail-writing etcetera. It's not overly loud but still a little annoying because it is not necessary.

I let CPUID Hardware Monitor run for about 30 minutes and these are the results:

The temperatures are far from being critical, yet the fan was running almost all the time.

I tried the two latest versions of ThinkPad Fan Control but it does not work with the E330, neither can I read out the fan speed with any program I try.

Does anyone else have these issues?

Is there a way to reduce the fan speed or turn the fan completely off until the temperatures reach maybe 65°?

If it matters: I bought the Laptop without a pre-installed OS and installed Win 7 HP 64 Bit and all the drivers from the Lenovo Homepage (including the Power Manager) myself.

[kevinj]

Probably the same issue most E530 's are having: once the fan starts, it never stops until you turn off the laptop or enter sleepmode.

[quintana]

Actually it does stop when it reaches constant temperatures below 40°C after about 20 minutes. Then it starts again when the temperature rises above 50°C which takes roughly 5 minutes.

But I would prefer the fan to slow down and just constantly keep the temperature around 50°C. Or maybe even completely stop. I don't know if the temperatures would rise above 60-65°C at all, if I just surf the web and listen to some music.

[quintana]

Can someone confirm this behaviour that the fan starts at above 50 degrees Celsius and shuts down when below 40 degrees are reached?

If it's a feature instead of a bug I would at least like to know, because right now I am considering to return it to the store because I am worried that it might be a defect.

I am olso worried that my fan might not know different speeds. It does not matter if the CPU is at 40 or 65 degrees Celsius, the noise level is always the same. Seems like my fan only knows "on" or "off" :-/

[frg]

Did you return it?

I have exactly same model (E330, 3354ALG) with same specs, and symptoms sound very similar.

Only difference is that I am mainly using Ubuntu (12.10), and while I have a dual boot installation, I have simply not been on Win7 enough to actually notice this behaviour, but on Ubuntu, it sounds very similar to yours.

I will do that CPUID test later.

On Ubuntu, lm-sensors does find one fan sensor but it shows "0 rpm", so it must be disabled:

sensors-detect:

http://codepad.org/r1V3DB0w 

sensors command:

http://codepad.org/SxhCverG

Right now it is making noise, but posting the above mainly to show the results of the sensor probing.

[frg]

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kevinj wrote:

Probably the same issue most E530 's are having: once the fan starts, it never stops until you turn off the laptop or enter sleepmode.

---

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-Edge-S-series/E530-pulsing-whiny-fan-no-low-load/td-p/797577

That is a depressingly long thread...

[frg]

In the above thread there is a semi-confirmation that this issue is fixed in E530's 2.52 bios version (not out yet). What about E330 and all other models that suffer from this problem?

[frg]

No further reports in this thread... while the E530 thread is super long. Is E330 just so much less popular model?

In the E530 thread I asked about E330, indirect reply from Mark_Lenovo:

"Regarding E330 or models other than E430/E530, that was not in the scope of this release, nor the focus of the discussion. Please start a new conversation for fan concerns with other models or else this discussion will drag on with concerns over other models piling on."

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-Edge-S-series/E530-pulsing-whiny-fan-no-low-load/m-p/1134979#M1...

If Lenovo engineers did really not look at other models other than E430/E530, I'm not really holding my breath they will in future either... or maybe it is totally different problem, but the symptoms are very similar (still not sure what the "pulsing" means in that thread - simply that the fan is on?).

[frg]

quintana, are you still here? :/

Here is a workaround that might work, taken from the E530 thread, it involves lowering the maximum processor state to 90%: http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-Edge-S-series/E530-pulsing-whiny-fan-no-low-load/m-p/1146425#M1...

I didn't try that one yet... and daily I use Linux Ubuntu, so that wouldn't help much anyway.

I was also thinking about updating my BIOS, altough the version history do not mention any changes to fans specifically. But I am really confused about the version numbers. My current BIOS ID is H3ET65WW and thus version is 1.02 which also shows up in the BIOS info. Are there like two branches of BIOSes, for Win7 only, and then for XP/Win7/Win8? If you compare the BIOS/UEFI versions and then the release dates in the "version information" part of the readme, it doesn't seem very chronological:

http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles/h3uj54ww.txt
http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles/h3uj04ww.txt

Those readmes (update utility versions vs. ISO update) are from here: http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/research/hints-or-tips/detail.page?&DocID=HT073765

[frg]

Bump.

Anyone tried the 1.09/1.17 BIOS? The newest, still the same as in my above post (for some reason on the download page it has been marked as being released July 31, altough I posted before that...).

Someone I have been messaging about this has a E330 i5 with stock BIOS v1.09 and he said he does not have this issue.