Hi Adam, Sorry for the delay. This specific message would crash my e-mail client when I tried to reply. This is fixed now but it took some time. On Fri, 19 Apr 2013 10:47:18 -0400, Adam Rosi-Kessel wrote: > Martin Hundeboll's suggestion lead me to at least a work-around. The box > came with a builtin mobo VGA card as well as a high-powered ATI catalyst > one (probably for gaming). I removed the high-powered VGA card and the > fan noise is back to normal. Not sure if the noise was from the fan on > the VGA card, or the VGA card was generating so much heat that other fans > never spun down, but in any case this is a fine solution because the box > is mainly a server. Well done. I have had similar problems on a laptop of mine but unfortunately removing the graphics chip wasn't an option there. The fan speed values you reported originally were around 1500 RPM and 1200 RPM originally (and here again below.) Unless one of these fans is defective, this should be reasonably quiet. So the theory that the graphics card's fan was the source of the noise seems more realistic. There are possibilities to limit the power used by the Radeon cards, but if you don't need it, removing it as you did is certainly the best option, for both noise and power consumption. > Incidentally, sensors-detect reported: > > Driver `it87': > * ISA bus, address 0x290 > Chip `ITE IT8718F Super IO Sensors' (confidence: 9) > > Driver `coretemp': > * Chip `Intel Core family thermal sensor' (confidence: 9) > > And sensors (the first one must be that "always 40.0" number): > > acpitz-virtual-0 > Adapter: Virtual device > temp1: +40.0°C (crit = +120.0°C) > > coretemp-isa-0000 > Adapter: ISA adapter > Core 0: +36.0°C (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C) > Core 1: +35.0°C (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C) > Core 2: +44.0°C (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C) > Core 3: +38.0°C (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C) > > it8718-isa-0290 > Adapter: ISA adapter > in0: +1.12 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.08 V) > in1: +3.04 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.08 V) > in2: +3.33 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.08 V) > +5V: +3.02 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.08 V) > in4: +3.01 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.08 V) > in5: +0.06 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.08 V) > in6: +0.10 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.08 V) > 5VSB: +2.77 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.08 V) > Vbat: +3.12 V > fan1: 1569 RPM (min = 0 RPM) > fan2: 0 RPM (min = 0 RPM) > fan3: 1171 RPM (min = 0 RPM) > temp1: +84.0°C (low = -1.0°C, high = +127.0°C) sensor = thermistor > temp2: +33.0°C (low = -1.0°C, high = +127.0°C) sensor = thermistor > temp3: -74.0°C (low = -1.0°C, high = +127.0°C) sensor = thermistor > cpu0_vid: +0.000 V This would require some configuration (labels and voltage scaling factors). Voltages and fans look right but temp1 is pretty high. Does it vary according to CPU load? Does the BIOS show any temperature value? This would let you map the temperature sensors. > > Do you have any /sys/class/thermal/cooling_device* with attribute type > > other than Processor? > > 0 is "Fan" and "1-4" are all Processor. Then it could be that the CPU fan is somehow controlled by ACPI (although ACPI should not let the it87 driver bind to the device if it also uses it.) You may check if the fan speed (presumably fan1) gets higher under load. > > Do you have any reason to believe that the fan speed can be controlled? > > Does it behave better under a different OS? > > My belief was based on the fact that for the first few minutes after > boot-up, the box operated quietly, and then would get very loud. So it > would seem *something* was controlling the fan speed. Yes, on Radeon graphics cards the fan speed is usually controlled by a closed-loop algorithm based on the measured chip temperature. My experience is that the open-source radeon driver isn't good at power management (by default, at least; there are sysfs attributes which can help improve the situation) so I can easily imagine that the graphics card's fan would spin fast most of the time. -- Jean Delvare _______________________________________________ lm-sensors mailing list lm-sensors@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.lm-sensors.org/mailman/listinfo/lm-sensors
