On Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:46:06 +0100, Michael Dreher wrote: > Am Mittwoch, 10. Februar 2010 20:43 schrieb Jean Delvare: > > On Wed, 10 Feb 2010 19:57:24 +0100, Michael Dreher wrote: > > > well, I have already chosen "Silent" (and I hear no difference). > > > And Windows 7 somehow can control the fans/sensors directly, bringing > > > the noise down to a much lower level ... > > > > Windows 7, or some vendor-provided application? > > this is windows 7 vanilla, direct from Microsoft. Shortly before the > login prompt, you hear a dropping down of the noise level. Could be the hardware (or ACPI) doing automatic temperature-based fan speed regulation. The system is usually very busy during boot, resulting in high CPU temperature. When you get to the login prompt, the hard work is done and the CPU might get cooler, leading to slower fans. But of course if you don't notice the same on Linux, then that would indeed be Windows doing something about it. This would be good news, so far Microsoft had been entirely ignoring temperature management. > Afterwards, I have installed the utilities from asus, and there you can > set the temperature for CPU and MB, the standard setting is 60 degrees > for both, and the lowest possible value (and standard setting from bios) > is 45 degrees. But I have no idea how risky it is to play with these > settings. You can probably assume it is safe if the vendor itself lets you change the values. It is usually a trade-off between noise and component lifetime. With higher limits, the hardware will age faster. That being said, it depends on what exactly these limits are changing... if they are changing the trip points for fan speed control, or the CPU throttling, or the emergency shutdown, the effects are quite different. Anyway, 45°C seems like an unreasonably low limit these days for a CPU. Some machines are running hotter than that even when idle. I can't remember ever setting the high limit for my CPU temperature below 55°C. 45°C may be OK for the case temperature, but I wouldn't mind increasing it to 50°C. -- Jean Delvare http://khali.linux-fr.org/wishlist.html _______________________________________________ lm-sensors mailing list lm-sensors@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.lm-sensors.org/mailman/listinfo/lm-sensors