V540TU v1.0.0-rc6: Random fan speed ups

[wessel-novacustom]

Component

Dasharo firmware

Device

NovaCustom V54 14th Gen

Dasharo version

v1.0.0-rc6

Dasharo Tools Suite version

No response

Test case ID

No response

Brief summary

The fan randomly spins up, even though the Quiet profile is set in the UEFI firmware settings.

This is most likely caused by changes in the firmware.

Please review the CPU configuration so that the CPU is not annoying.

How reproducible

Good reproducible

How to reproduce

1. Upgrade from v0.9.0 to v1.0.0-rc6.
2. Boot into your daily driver OS, this was tested with Linux Mint in my case.
3. Do your normal thing: use the laptop as you would do normally by opening applications, emailing, browsing, and so on.

Expected behavior

The fan keeps quiet during your work.

Actual behavior

Fans are spinning up randomly.

Screenshots

No response

Additional context

I have a docking station with two monitors connected. I'm not sure if it is related, but I think that video calling is rather buggy: the video playback of the others is not smooth. This was not the case for v0.9.0.

The fan speed was fine under v0.9.0.

Solutions you've tried

No response

[philipanda]

@wessel-novacustom Have you been monitoring the CPU temperature? Maybe some unidentified process has caused some load?
In the silent fan curve the fan speeds increase drastically when the CPU temperature exceeds ~75 C.
May I ask for the model of your laptop? Did it have a dedicated Nvidia GPU?

[BeataZdunczyk]

May I ask for the model of your laptop?

V540TU, v1.0.0-rc6 with Mint

[philipanda]

V540TU, v1.0.0-rc6 with Mint

Right, thanks, I've missed the title.

From my testing using the dasharo ACPI driver and by holding my ear on the fans, the fan curves seem to work perfectly fine on a V540TND with v1.0.0-rc6, Ubuntu LTS 24.04.3, 155H. Nvidia drivers installed and the dgpu is being used.

By applying an artificial load on the CPU and the GPU, the fan speeds increase from the baseline, quiet 2000RPM not noticably louder ~2500RPM when the CPU temperatures range from 50 to up to ~70C.
When the temperature exceeds 75C, immediately start running much faster, up to even ~5000 RPM at 80C, and that is very much noticeable. When the temperature falls below ~70C, the fans need a couple seconds to slow down. After about 3-5s the RPMs are back to ~2000 RPM which does not make any noticeable noise.

I've repeated the same exact stress test on v0.9.0, the same device. Apart from measuring the precise RPMs, as the Dasharo ACPI driver does not support this version of the firmware, the fan curves look to behave exactly the same. When the temperature rises to about 75 C the fans start to be noticeable. Until the temperature reaches ~75 C the fans are whisper silent.

I wasn't able to exceed ~75C and make the fans loud by applying load to the CPU alone. stress --cpu 20 --io 20 --vm 20 program certainly was certainly not enough and the temperatures were about 50C and about 60C when I've covered the cooling vents.

[philipanda]

On a V540TU with v1.0.0-rc6, Ubuntu LTS 24.04.3, stressing the CPU alone is enough to cause the fans to speed up. Possibly due to a slightly less efficient cooling solution, designed for lower power consumption.

The fans stay at ~3000RPM when under no load.
When a load is applied to just one core, eg. stress-ng --cpu 1 --cpu-load 90, the CPU Package temperature raported by the dasharo_acpi driver skyrockets immediately to about 70C despite most cores being idle. At that temperature the fans spin at 4000-5000 RPM which causes noticeable noise.

The same happens when I apply a little load to more cores, like stress-ng --cpu 10 --cpu-load 10. All the cores stay at ~50C, but the package temperature is reported to be ~75C making the high fan speeds justified.

That is definitely much different from the V540TND where the package temperature rises very slowly, not immediately upon any load, and seems to be around the average core temperature.

Things like opening LibreOffice writer are enough to trigger the high fan RPMs because the package temperature increases to over 75C for a fraction of a second and immediately falls down back to ~50C despite all cores staying at about 50C.

With Dasharo v0.9.0 the package temperature rises in the same fashion as in v1.0.0-rc6, but it is not correlated with the fan speeds. When I run the stress-ng commands from before, the package temperature still quickly rises to more than 75C and the cores stay at about 50C, but the fans do not spin up.

I confirm that the issue does appear on v1.0.0-rc6 and does not on v0.9.0 on V540TU on Ubuntu LTS 24.04.3.
I suspect that when adding support for the Dasharo ACPI driver the sensor used to detect the CPU temperature used to steer the fans, or the method of processing the raw measurements were changed and the currently source of temperature is highly susceptible to short spikes of temperature which causes the fans to start spinning up randomly.

[wessel-novacustom]

Exactly. I think it's acceptable to have peaks of 75 - 80 °C. So maybe we should set the higher fan speed at a higher level? Or wait a bit till we spin up the fan that much?

[scvalex]

I've started seeing this after upgrading to 1.0.0.

I always have a temperature widget in my taskbar and I don't see much of a difference there, but after the 1.0.0 upgrade, the fan sometimes revs up to a volume I had never heard before. It's definitely in response to CPU load and short temperature rises, but it's much louder than it used to be.