Acer fan ALWAYS on, loud :(

[imcanadaian]

So I have a aspire 3680, upgraded to a T5200--and it's driving me crazy that the fan on this machine is so LOUD. When it had the celeron, it was even worse: the fan's constantly on...laptop running hot

With the T5200, my temps are a LOT lower, computer runs great, but the fan still leaves something to be desired. It's basically ALWAYS on when I'm using the computer--the only time it turns off is when the computer is idle, BEFORE the screensaver comes up (because, I guess the screensaver heats up the computer....) I've been suspsecting that, since the CPU and graphics card on this machine (GMA 950) share a fan/heatsink, that it's really the graphics card causing the temps and the fan to run? Because I'm idling at 44C, and simply typing in word, all of a sudden the fan will come on for a couple of minutes.

What should I do? I've heard that there's no software fan control for acer's...maybe open the laptop up again, apply new thermal paste to the GPU now? (I think there's a big blue thermal pad on the GPU now...or it might be the chipset...I wasn't too sure when I opened up the computer)

[synic]

Can you control the fan speed from the BIOS?

[imcanadaian]

No, there are no options for fan speed in the bios--the only settings I can change are settings concerning the integrated graphics and how much memory to allocate, some boot drive options...that's about it

[bigozone]

nothing can control ACER FANS except the APCI which uses the hard coded FAN INFO in the BIOS that the USER has no control over,, the fans turn on according to the the TEMPS reported by the CPU and the APCI and BIOS turn on the fans when the temps exceed the pre-determined temperature thresh-hold... and can also POWER DOWN the system if the MAX TEMP LIMIT is exceeded.

unless you wanna do a serious hardware modification on your laptop and void your warranty,,

your only other option is to consider having a custom bios built that has different ON/OFF temps and different temps for the triggering the CHANGING OF FAN-SPEED.

[Phaleron]

You could get yourself a laptop cooling pad like the Zalman ZM-NC1000. It has two larger active fans (not as loud) as the interal fans cooling your laptop. Using a cooling pad may just keep your notebook cool enough to run without the internal fan coming on when your doing basic stuff on your computer.