CPU and Power supply fan speed

[ryptyde]

Have a Sony Vaio desktop P4,1.6Ghz.At boot up the cooling fans increase in speed and when the OS(XP) begins to load the fans return to normal(slower) speed.

Whenever I have booted a Linux "live cd" the fans always stay on hi-speed.Recently have installed a second drive as slave with FC4 and when
it boots and the OS loads the fans stay on hi-speed.

I have checked for any type of options in the bios but have only saw where the actual fan running speed is listed and no provision to fiddle with the settings.

Thought of setting the FC4 drive as master to see if that matters but thought to check here if anyone has knowledge of the fan settings at boot.

Phil

[ryptyde]

Done a check by installing the FC4 hd only and still the power supply fan is going top speed even after logging in and at the desktop.Must be a setting in the bios that gets a signal from the os to slow the fans.

Was at a local electronics outlet and there were replacement fans available that had provisions to manually switch speeds.Will do some more googling again to see what shows up there.

Phil

[jdtate101]

Sounds like the ACPI is now working correctly. Can you type
"sensors"
as root. This will check to see if you have the ability to monitor the H/W from inside the OS. I suggest you manually set the CPU fan speed to a reasonable one (ie quiet) in the bios and have a manually variable case fan. I have found this to be the best solution, because like you a reboot of my server always left the fans sounding like a jet on full takeoff!

[Rhakios]

I think he'll need to do sensors-detect first, and make sure the sensors package (sometimes call lm-sensors) is installed.

[ryptyde]

Typed in "sensors" as root, "No sensors found!" was the reply.

Phil

[Rhakios]

That's because you need to run sensors-detect first.

[ryptyde]

Running "sensors-detect" gives "sensors-detect: command not found".
Running "sensors -detect" gives "sensors: invalid option -- d".

Entering "sensors -h" gives a list of options to use but always says
"No sensors found" when trying them.

Phil

[Rhakios]

If you have the lm_sensors package installed, the sensors-detect script is in /usr/sbin, so naturally you need to have this in your path (and it should be executed as root, so that's root's path). I have looked in the FC4 rpm for lm_sensors and it is there.

[jjmac]

Howdy.

I'm not an expert on this but a couple of things below may be useful, so, just to follow from the above ...


lm_sensors will only display the temp/rpm state, not alter it.


The output is provided by some dedicated sensors that must exist on your mobo, that info being delivered by a chip. Once installed, "sensors -h" will show a set of possible chip types. And, as per the above, running sensors-detect should set it all up. The config will have sections that cover a number of these chips, depending on whats found on your board, some tweaking may or may not be useful. As usual, it is there in the docs.

>>
Have a Sony Vaio desktop P4,1.6Ghz.At boot up the cooling fans increase in speed and when the OS(XP) begins to load the fans return to normal(slower) speed.
>>

If the mobo didn't have a sensor chip/facility then that wouldn't happen and, of course, XP has the driver support built in.

Different manufactures "reveal" the internals of these chips to various degrees. But they all seem to have a proprietary attitude with regard to them.

Most of the lm-sensors projects work has involved laborious reverse engenerring, and, making basically, logical assumptions. some times they have discovered errors in the manufacturers supplied specs !.

>>
I have checked for any type of options in the bios but have only saw where the actual fan running speed is listed and no provision to fiddle with the settings.
>>

Your mobo must have support ...

Otherwise you wouldn't have gotten the result with XP. And that does suggest bios support. Most mobo manufactures tend to work in cahoots with MS, so it does need to be scrutinised as to what you can do.

Such as, with the ASUS A8V, the bios provided explanation/setting is very brief. It uses a thing called "Cool & Quiet" which only has a "Enabled/Disabled" option. Which then requires two further setting enabled, "CPU Q-Fan Control" and "Chassis Q-Fan Control". There is also a very cryptic "Ratio" setting provided. The manual is the pinnacle of the "dumbed-down", "which way did it go" explanations. It seems ASUS provided some nice gui's for setting up their facility, but only if you run Windows.

Look over your bios/manual again. There must be something there otherwise it wouldn't work in XP. You will need kernel support. Though i would have thought FC would have already set that. It doesn't hurt to check. It will be in the CPU Frequency scaling section. That may sound like the wrong place, but it seems there tied together. At least for AMD, there are intell options there as well.

You may need to check to see if you have "i2c" support enabled too, which provides access to your "System Management Bus", as sensors will likely require that. Along with ACPI -> ACPI Support -> Processor -> ThermalZone enabled. From "make gconfig", not sure how that works but the kernel config recomends it for mobiles.


Changing drives around, master/slave wont have any effect.
Your PSU should have a connector, as should the CPU Fan, that plugs into the mobo, they should be three pin connectors.



jm

[ryptyde]

OK,I will look further into the bios as there could have been a "disguised" setting.
Will post back results if I get lucky and find a workaround.

Thanks for all the help and direction guys and have a Happy New Year!

Phil

[ryptyde]

Sorry for being so slow with a solution but I was being sluggish.
Here's what pushed me to try a different approach,purchased a 500W
power supply to accomadate my graphics card.

OK so while going through the process of removing old to replace new PS it occured to me that I could change the cpu's fan voltage.Tapped in to the 5V output and instantly reduced the fan speed to less than half and the noise level dropped considerably to a liveable level.

Phil