Let lower power laptops breathe

jimbobUK · Post by **jimbobUK** » Mon Jul 25, 2005 5:12 pm

I went on a bit of a madness purchasing spree over the weekend, all down to an earlier madness that led to my latest headphones

http://jimtreats.com/k1000/

Which are actually ear speakers and are the least isolating headphones you could ever have. All my serious headphones are open anyways so far so all suffer from having noise sit on top of the music, and its this that has motivated me to desperately silence my machines. I've had some success but large numbers of hdds and a requirement to play games has led to a non-silent solution so a lower power notebook was in order.

I got an older HP centrino laptop with a 1.5mhz pentium M, 512meg memory, 60gig hdd, on board gfx... not exactly equiped to burn through gaming but i had a far more specialised and lighter task ahead, of just playing music via foobar2000 in various formats, silently.

Got it home, assembled it (put the battery in), and turned it on... a bit of fan but still a mile away from the desktop 3.2ghz laptop that i already owned.. finally into windows proper (and perhaps even before then) and the fan actually powered down and i was greeted with a very nice level of silence, sure the hdd was audible when thrashed, barely audible when gently accessing.. this is from inches away, not feet..

Thinking everything was perfect i finally got into the OS proper, and started to notice the fan powering up far more often than i'd like.. it wasn't loud, but it was audible from the distances i was going to be away when listening to my music in an otherwise silent room.

I was resting it on a bean bagged tray, the kind you're supposed to eat food off of in front of a tv i guess.. it has a wooden top, which at least meant the laptops feet were holding it off the surface, rather than having it on fabric or something less even.

I started to get annoyed thinking i'd have to return it as it just wasn't quiet enough.. i went into investigating how the speed step was functioning.. the battery was charged and off its power it was still spinning up far too often... playing a flac-ed audio in foobar2000 on repeat it would spin up every few minutes for 20-30secs, then off again... arghhh!!!

Finally i lifted it off and noticed the bottom of the laptop and the tray surface was warm, warmer than i'd like from a processor giving out 7watts or so when in 600mhz mode.

I makeshifted raising the laptop further off the surface than the puny laptop feet were doing by using 2x 2 dvd cases stacked and resting the laptop on top of them.. I settled down and left the test of the track playing, and no more fan spin up.. i dabbled with the machine a bit more and again it was far more reluctant to get the fans spinning.. that was settled then.. the stock laptop feet are just unbelivably poor at getting the laptop high enough off the ground for ventalation to actually help the fans out.

Today i picked up a set of these

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?Mod ... 8&doy=25m7

which i've not fixed, rather rested them upside down and put the laptop on top, its not quite as far off the ground but its still much more than normal.. also now there is far more of the laptops underbelly exposed to free air than when i had full lengths of dvd cases holding them up.. again the performance has been great today with regards to fan speed..

Anyways that's about it.. if you are annoyed with fan speed up at low usage then help the laptop along with some kind of feet improvisation.. you dont need a laptop cooler, just something to get it in mid air properly. Give it a try, it may get you a silent laptop when you'd lost all hope.. finger's crossed it seems to have done the job for me

Artagra · Post by **Artagra** » Tue Jul 26, 2005 8:03 am

Good suggestion - also look at Centrino Hardware Control or RMClock - both of these apps will let you undervolt the CPU, which will decrease the heat.

Artag

jimbobUK · Post by **jimbobUK** » Tue Jul 26, 2005 12:33 pm

Thanks for the links, i was looking for something similar when it was ramping up too much.. how do both of those programs co-operate with windows XP's enhanced speed step handling? I'm set at max battery at the moment as this is supposedly the most aggressive down clocking.

Which is best out of those two apps? Anyone else using them on pentium Ms, over default XP behaviour?

Artagra · Post by **Artagra** » Tue Jul 26, 2005 3:23 pm

I'm using RMClock, and it plays nicely with the XP speed step controls. I leave windows on the default "Laptop/portable" setting, but it doesn't seem to matter because RMClock overrides it.

Artag

jimbobUK · Post by **jimbobUK** » Tue Jul 26, 2005 3:37 pm

ok cheers.. what kind of stuff have you got that set to do then!? i'll only turn to this if the fans annoy when doing what i want done silently, but its good to know.

BenS · Post by **BenS** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 12:05 pm

Go with RM Clock... It is a fantastic app. Using Prime 95 while you manipulate the voltage, you can go pretty low. Wait till Prime 95 fails, then bump up the voltage two levels. Works great and the software author regularly posts on the RightMark forum so any suggestions/bugs are quickly addressed in subsequent updates. I started using it a v 1.4 and I think its up to v 1.6 now... Check it out...

jimbobUK · Post by **jimbobUK** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 1:25 pm

I've tried both.. I was getting more fan noise yesterday whilst charging the battery... desperate to avoid it i looked into those two.. i liked the look of rmclock but actually getting it to do anything had a load of options that i didn't know whether i could enable or not. Centrino hardware control on the other hand was fairly straight forward.. i undervolted the lowest speed setting to 0.7v .. it did a small test.. not sure how i could prime95 test the 600mhz speed setting as with cpu usage it would go up to the faster speeds.

At 0.7v i was able to stop the fans from coming on at all.. the temps slowly climbed, i'll have another go tonight but i think with that i'll just about be able to get the function i need out of my laptop silently (music playback)

BenS · Post by **BenS** » Fri Jul 29, 2005 9:18 pm

RM Clock does have some pretty confusing options... However, the readme/RightMark forum are both good sources for explaining all that stuff. But hey, if you got to 0.7 V using the Centrino Utility, then that is great! RM Clock also bottoms out at 0.7 so you did great all around.

Now if someone would just write one of these for PowerBooks I would be super happy!

jimbobUK · Post by **jimbobUK** » Sat Jul 30, 2005 2:00 pm

centrino hardware control allows you to stop upping the speed on load so i now run at 600mhz, 0.7v all the time.. i'll now be able to test it with prime95.. in fact i'll do that right now

be nice to watch where the temperatures go.. they hover at 60 degrees when idling/playing music after a while.. just enough below ramping up the fan ever (wish i had control of that, CHC supports that but not on my laptop!)

Will try a quick prime95 run now.. everything is nearly set now.. was chuffed that i managed to get a HDCD signal out of my new M-Audio Transit.. it means i'm sending bit perfect audio out of the machine which is all i can ask for really

jimbobUK · Post by **jimbobUK** » Sun Jul 31, 2005 6:43 am

ok well it successfully prime95-ed for an hour or two at 600mhz @ 0.7v .. I consider that stable enough for me.

What was interesting was the temperature took a long time to rise.. similar to my watercooled PC when the fans are off (unfortunately it can't passively cool, so takes hours just getting hotter and hotter, slowly but surely) .. It managed to get up to 65 degrees.. I've no doubt that it would continue to rise.. what i did like was that it never ramped the fans up at all.. possibly they were just starting to spin slowly at around 65, a slight whine is audible very close to it.. The thing that annoyed me most about it before was that in use it would just jump up to 1.5ghz for a few seconds, the temperature would shoot up 10-15 degrees and the fan would come on for 20 seconds or so.. this stop start was very frustrating.

ANyways the best bit was i'd deliberately closed all windows, i'd got monitors, 3 PCs, tv, hifi and me in the room and it was getting uncomfortably warm ambient temperature.. i dunno how much as i didn't have a thermometer.. i'd pretty much always have my window open and less equipment on when i want to silently listen to music so i figured this was a nice test with at least a 3-5 degree rise over what i'd find comfortable ambient temperature.. even in this case, prime95-ing didn't cause a significant fan ramp up.. I started playing a flac playlist like i would want to when listening music and i stopped prime95 .. i wondered whether in this idle state it was still getting hotter and hotter just over a slower time.. what i was happy about was a drop off in temperature as soon as stopped prime95.. it took a while to drop fully but it easily got down to 60 degrees after 5 minutes or so.. pretty much proving that it shouldn't get above this in that mode of operation.

The only thing i have left to try is if hdd temperatures escalating by constant flac decoding can force the hdd temperature, and then CPU temperature to climb above that range.. nice to know though that around 65 degrees is an easy ceiling to watch for before fan speed up, i previously thought it was nearer to 60 degrees which is where it was comfortably getting close to.

Anyways fingers crossed i've got a good one here.. in case anyone else is craving for a fanless laptop (in this downclocked mode) here's its details

brought in the UK from a staples office supply store (in Derby)

HP Pavillion ze2045ea

Centrino
Pentium M715a
15" XGA monitor
60gig 4200rpm hdd
512 meg ram
onboard gfx with (64 meg) shared memory

£600

its a veritable silent bargain in this mode.. even in normal operation its not terribly loud.

Time to enjoy it some more

BenS · Post by **BenS** » Sun Jul 31, 2005 3:46 pm

Well done Jimbob, well done indeed. There is nothing like having a problem, working on it yourself, and coming to a fantastic resolution. Enjoy your silent computer and enjoy it a little more for me, the poor guy stuck with a noisy PowerBook. Nice job!

jimbobUK · Post by **jimbobUK** » Sun Jul 31, 2005 4:44 pm

Thanks, yeah will definately have to pencil in some quality time using it and enjoying music and my new headphones.

Tested hdd temps today.. left it playing some flac albums in a loop and watched what happened to the temps.. initially it went into standby as i'd not turned that off, afterwards though a good 2-3 hours went by and it didn't really get above 60 degrees.. hdd temps were maxed out at about 44 degrees.. i'd left a fan on in the room and its not exactly summer weather over here so by the end it was sat at 58 degrees. That's pretty much settled, apart from in the hottest of weather (and perhaps not even then) i should never have to hear its fan when i'm just listening to music with it

Its certainly taught me that for ultimate silence these pentium M laptops seem to be pretty special indeed.. i've no doubt that a system built with these chips (and a 2.5" drive) would be just as good if not better for being able to have custom silent fans spinning slowly/silently. Whether i get round to trying it out on my machines we'll have to see.. 1 really silent machine is enough to take care of those tasks that demand silence, though a general lowering of noise floor all the time wouldn't hurt.

BenS · Post by **BenS** » Mon Aug 01, 2005 6:50 am

Yeah you're darn right its a special chip! Good enough to make Apple switch to Intel chips!