Lately on my ASUS X54C laptop (Windows 7) , the fan has been loud. The one thing I loved about this laptop was how quite it was. Now it is getting annoying listening to it. I took it in to a trusted PC shop lately and had everything checked out. Thy found no issues. They even opened it up and cleaned the whole thing out. It usually runs the CPU at 25% and physical memory at 60%. Things like videos cause the fan to get louder.
Any tech savvy guys have any suggestions on how this can be solved, short of replacing the fan unit itself?
Any safe sites were you can see the actual speed of the fan?
Rattling noise indicated that the ball bearings are busted, so the fan needs replacement. If the fan is transporting more air, it simply indicates the computer registering higher temparatures in the casing. That can be caused by a higher CPU/GPU load (maybe a different video codec that compresses better but requires more computational power on playback), by higher ambient temperatures (if your room is hot in the summer but cold in winter, that would nicely explain why the fan must work more now), by a faulty temperature sensor (probably difficult to replace), a bug (or a correction) in the mainboard firmware (did you perform a BIOS upgrade lately?), or the build-up of dirt (unlikely, since you had it cleaned recently).
I think the temperature sensor for most current CPUs are on the CPU itself, and something like that should be pretty durable.
Also another thing besides the fan itself to watch out for is the thermal contact between the fan heatpipes and the chips they are supposed to cool. If the thermal grease or pad is old or misapplied then it would be hot and loud. But since you have just had them serviced them in a trusted shop, I don't think that would be the case. The heatpipes themselves could also leak and fail, but those are just sealed copper pipes with coolant in them and should not fail too easily.
And what Ssnake said. For fan speed, you can check out SpeedFan, but be careful with that as it had some features that could be damaging if misused.
I would agree with JWNoctis.I had a similar problem with my MSI laptop.I noticed the fan getting louder (spinning faster,not making unusual noises) around 18 months old and after checking out the MSI forums it was recommended I remove the heatsinks,both CPU and GPU and re-apply thermal paste.This did the trick.
Did the shop just clean it out,if so that may not have been enough.On mine,removing the heatsinks is quite easy,I just followed a YT video.
If you watch Jaws backwards, it's a heart warming story about a shark that spits out so many people that they have to open a beach.
Thanks guys. I have always been sensitive to the sound of a PC fan. Always gave me a headache after a while. My old gaming laptop drove me nuts sometimes.
I am going to have the shop take another look at it with these suggestions in mind.
When I turn it on. It is quite, until I open an IE, Chrome, or e-mail session. I don't hear any rattling. Just the fan working harder. It does feel like it is producing more heat than it used to. It is 6 years old, but I hate to replace it.
Because if you do, it could be that the notification service is driving up the processor temperature, setting the fan into full speed. Known bug, don't know if Microsoft fixed it already.
Under settings > notification and actions, untick "show me tips about Windows".
Why men throw their lives away attacking an armed Witcher... I'll never know. Something wrong with my face?
I've noticed recently myself (I'm on Windows 7) that especially on start up some Microsoft process called trustedinstaller seems to put a load on the cpu and seems to make the hard drive and the pc in general more noisy until its done. Seems telling though that you said its fine until you run IE or similar program.
There are free fan speed controlling programs out there. I looked into that myself because like you I'm sensitive to the noise and lately my fans have been bugging me.(I've got some tinnitus and the fan pitch just hits that wrong frequency and creates so much noise in my head) However I accidentally set something in my bios to factory when trying to do so and really messed myself up for about a week.
if your fan is starting to make noise and it does not go away after blowing compressed air into the fan and vent slots, it means the bearings are shot and you will need to buy a new fan. the fan itself is cheap but replacing them on most laptops is a huge pain in the ass.
this is one repair i would send to a shop to do if it's within your budget. the repair itself is quite straightforward but it's just such a PITA to take off all the bezels and keyboard and etc etc etc. you pretty much need to remove every component of the laptop just to get at and replace the stupid fan.
new fans are on ebay usually for around 10-20$, make sure you get the exact part number, wrong fan models won't work and might wreck your computer.
Well, on my 5yo Dell Inspiron 15 the fan is close to being the very last component you could remove in a complete disassembly, which I've never managed myself due to some hard-to-remove clip-on keyboard.
Best design for maintenance, that one - compressed air to exhaust and vacuum nozzle to fan inlet seemed to still work fine so far but yeah, it is going noisy probably due to some dry thermal grease as well.
Your CPU should be at or below 10% most of the time unless you're using a program like a game or web browser with embedded videos on the page. If you see consistent 25%+ even when most programs are closed and it's sitting idle, something is wrong. Something is stuck. Something is holding on to processes when it shouldn't be any longer.
We've had a wave of laptops here getting that issue after a round of updates coinciding with deploying 8.1 from 8.0. Sometimes I had to find a 3rd party program like a scanner or printer driver and remove it. Sometimes I had to delete and recreate the profile (because if you logged is as another user it was fine). Sometimes I had to reimage the whole stupid thing.
The Jedi Master
The anteater is wearing the bagel because he's a reindeer princess. -- my 4 yr old daughter
Yes, click Show processes from all users or you don't see the whole picture. Memory usage can be an indicator, too, but you want to sort by CPU first.
The fact that it happens when you use Chrome indicates to me it's likely Flash or some other browser-related program. Out of curiosity, does it happen if you come here using IE?
The Jedi Master
The anteater is wearing the bagel because he's a reindeer princess. -- my 4 yr old daughter
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
Flash has been a serious issue when using Google maps to. It freezes on me when I move the map around and takes forever to catch up. Move it to many times and it will crash using Firefox.
IE, Chrome, E-mail. Even if I open nothing, after a few minutes the fan start winding up now. I do appreciate all the suggestions. My desk top skills have deteriorated lately, not to mention 'chemo brain' ,working on things like this a bit hard lately.
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
