Zbook 15 G3 Fan Activity

[xuanguang]

Hi Intendmind, are you replying my tips?

If so, you can see the current temperature of your CPU in the right bottom notification area of taskbar any time. In my machine, it is always around 36 Celsius degrees. So it should not damage the mahine.

Of course, you can adjust "Notebook FanControl" configurature file your self, if you find the CPU temperature it too high on your side.

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@Intendmind wrote:

Hiya,thanks for the tips. It worked like a charm! I was trying to send back the product.
However,I am a bit concerned .The fan is so quiet I can't hear anything moving.Won't this cause any internal damnage over a period of time? I have the G3 special edition one.

It seems like the fan is not spinning at all.So quiet now.

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[xuanguang]

Additionally, if you put your ear on the laptop, you can hear CPU fan is running, just the fan running voice is very small

[sylo18]

Hey I tried your XML (Wouldn't import so just copied the settings)

It shows two fans in the control window.

I can control fan 1. But not fan 2, which seems to be the loud one as it runs at 100% when I run CPU (mildly) Heavy things.

Any tips or ideas?

Thanks

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@xuanguang wrote:

Additionally, if you put your ear on the laptop, you can hear CPU fan is running, just the fan running voice is very small

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[sylo18]

for those interested, I got it working.

I was downloading the xml file wrong.

Anyway, finally downloaded the actual xml file properly, put in the folder and was able to control both fans.

Thanks

[artisticcheese]

I think this thread is long enough for HP representative to comment on this development. I don't think it's in best interest of neither customer no HP as company to force customers to 'hack' their laptops because vendor so far failed to provide any reasonable explanation about amount of noise emitted by laptop.

[pexu]

I wish I had checked this thread before updating the BIOS from 01.12 to 01.14 as there weren't any notices about the update touching the thermal management side. Not that 01.12 was too good, but at least it didn't keep the fans spinning a few minutes after each load spike. All the extra time manages to do is to drop the temperature about 1-2 degrees, maybe from 39c to 37c. What a waste for nothing.

There really should be some official setting, tweak or tool to properly configure fan speeds on this laptop. The noise the laptop generates is just terrible to listen day in, day out. Really ruins otherwise a very capable workhorse.

[artisticcheese]

My solution so far was buying 1.5m lightening 3 cable and another power adapter and moving this noisy laptop as far as possible from me. This is so stupid that HP is  mum about this obvious issue that forces customer either hack into OS to force it to calm down fans or buy additional hardware to stay away from laptop as far as possible.

[EmilianoHeyns]

This is exactly what I have done; it's now secured using a kensington cable in one of the shelves under my desk. Which means that for the same money, my manager could have gotten a more powerful *and* less noisy desktop system, which would incidentally also have supported wake-on-usb -- unlike this sad excuse for a BIOS.

I'll make **bleep** sure these issues are remembered when the tender for our PC/laptop provider goes out next year.

[Turranius]

We just got a few Zbook 15 G3's as well here and it wasn't until I started working on one that it started to really annoy me with the constant noise. We are on BIOS 1.14 and Windows 7 and 10.

Sometimes you just get used to it, until you shut it off for the day and your ears go "ahhhhh nice and quiet".

I tried the various fan tools here and from my experience, it is NOT the CPU fan that makes the most noise on normal work, its the NVidia GPU Fan. I set the CPU fan to 0 for fun and I can hear one fan going silent, but the annoying fan noise is still there from the other. Worth noting is that I run it 100% while docked with 2 external screens.

I unplug the docking station and only use the internal screen, that is then using the Intel graphics and the fan noise goes away totally.

So I tried changing it in the BIOS so that the external screens use Intel as well (I don't really care since its a work laptop). That did not work. Still uses NVidia and still the same noise.

The sound coming from the GPU fan is constantly high and does not change. The only way to "fix" that is to, as I read in this thread, hibernate the machine after rebooting and waking it up again. Now the GPU Fan noise is not constant but goes up and down as it should. Quite quiet after doing that. This is on a Windows 7 x64 installation.

Edit: Just installed BIOS 1.16 but no difference.

[Misterd83]

I just open a support request by HP and get an answer. It's "As Design". It's normal that the fan is always running...