Fan noise at relatively low CPU/memory usage

[Rasectos]

Already posted this question in the German HP forum but since I haven't received an answer, I'll try my luck over here.

I recently bought an HP Envy 17, complete with 4k screen, i7 chip and so forth. Thing works like a charm except that the fan turns itself on after a while without any sort of major workload. CPU is at 10% or less, memory at around 30-40%. I feel it is rather annoying to have the fan running at a rather noticeable noise when an older HP laptop that I own remains completely quiet throughout the day.

BIOS has already been updated, I have turned off HP Coolsense. Any other option? Can I somehow manually increase the temperature before the fan kicks into action.

[mdklassen]

It is possible that Windows Update (or a virus-scan) is running as a background task.

Launch Windows Update, to connect to the background task.

If it shows that updates are being downloaded or applied, you have your answer.

Start the Windows Task Manager.

Switch to the "Performance" tab.

Near the bottom, click the "Resource Monitor" button.

Drill-down on each category (CPU, active disk Input/Output, network traffic, RAM) to see which processes are consuming what resources.

Tell us what you see.

[Rasectos]

Chrome is by far the biggest RAM-hog according to task manager. This isn't much of a surprise though. I have an older HP laptop (18 months old) with 12 GB worth of RAM and 50% of memory is usually used during a regular workload. The fan can never be heard though. So this was my fundamental question about this laptop: Is it normal for the fan to jump into action for a couple of minutes when it reaches 35% of memory usage? I suppose it's not necessarily caused by that as sometimes it'll be at >40% and the fan remains quiet. I suppose therefore it has something to do with the internal temperature? 

Really like the thing and if I know that this is to be expected, I'm sure I can live with it. 

[mdklassen]

> 12 GB worth of RAM and 50% of memory is usually used during a regular workload

That is a lot -- my 8 GB desktop usually uses about 25% (2 GB), under Windows 7.

>  Is it normal for the fan to jump into action for a couple of minutes when it reaches 35% of memory usage?

Very doubtful.

Most motherboards only have 2 temperature sensors -- one for the motherboard itself, and one for the processor.

Some motherboards can monitor the temperature-sensor inside the disk-drive.

Only Windows can tell you how much RAM is "active" -- the motherboard cannot track it.

It takes a very-intensive program, e.g., MEMTEST86 from www.memtest.org

to heat-up RAM to anything significantly above the ambient temperature inside the computer case.

So, there's no need to have a sensor near the RAM.

> I suppose it's not necessarily caused by that as sometimes it'll be at >40% and the fan remains quiet.

> I suppose therefore it has something to do with the internal temperature? 

Yes, to both.

Experiment: close all applications, except Windows Task Manager, and launch a "full" virus-scan.

It won't use much RAM (it reads files, one at a time, into the same buffer), but it will use the processor, and will push the disk-drive to 100% activity -- it can virus-scan faster than the disk-drive can read each file.

Find a hardware-monitoring program, e.g., the "free" version of SPECCY from www.piriform.com

that will show you, in real-time, the values from the motherboard & disk-drive sensors, and the speed of the CPU fan.

Have that running while you do your experiment, watch the CPU temperature and fan-speed.