SPCR

so my school basically FORCED me to buy a laptop from one of their "approved vendors"... what a scam.... all in the name of hardware homologation, but it's so obviously a deal with the DEviLL...

anyways... this thing is horrendously loud. the first time i booted it up, the hard disk noise was quite apparent. i thought it was at least bearable, BUT then the cpu fan kicked in with a mighty roar.... well, more of a whirring sound but you get the idea.... i have yet to fire up the 3D graphics and see how loud/hot this gets. not looking forward to that test...

of course, most people would say i'm exaggerating about the noise, but this is SPCR so keep that in mind....

Well, you could always try undervolting. Try Notebook Hardware Control.

On my Dell D610, it helps quite a bit to keep the noise and temps down. Shaves off about 6-7 watts at full CPU load.

Do you find that the hard drive clicks every five seconds or so?

Search for a utility called I8kfangui, which allows you to control the fan on many Dell laptops. It's harder to control temps on Core Duo equipped laptops than P-M's because the former don't allow undervolting to the same extent.

all the speed/bios options in NHC are greyed out... i can't seem to change anything...

anyone have experience with silencing this beast?

qviri wrote:Do you find that the hard drive clicks every five seconds or so?

well... i've had this beast for 5 days now, and no, i don't have any clicking issues. you should really get that checked out.

the hard disk is still really loud sometimes... sometimes it will be whirring away at full speed even though the laptop is just sitting idle... the quiet mode seems to be the same setting as factory default, so setting quiet mode did nothing at all. if THIS is quiet, then i want to try max performance mode to see how long it takes for me to lose my hearing.

mr. poopyhead wrote:

qviri wrote:Do you find that the hard drive clicks every five seconds or so?

well... i've had this beast for 5 days now, and no, i don't have any clicking issues. you should really get that checked out.

They're not my machines... but I've heard the tick from most of the 14 machines we ordered, so I doubt it's a failing hard drive problem.

Maybe something to do with first few days of Vista. I haven't been in contact with them since so I don't know if the situation improved.

I just purchased a D630 - it's both good & bad!

Bulid quality is pretty good, and the magnesium chassis is quite a work of art. However, being metal, it tends to act as one big heatsink, which means that the temperature of the case gets very high (measured a maximum of 110 degrees F), which to my mind is a bit too hot for use on your lap - even with long trousers (wouldn't like to try it with shorts!).

Mine came with a Seagate 7200 rpm drive, which was way too loud - the problem is that the disk is screwed directly to the chassis (no way of soft mounting - there is just not enough free space) - so the whole chassis acts as one big sounding board. After a week, I changed it for a Momentus hybrid drive, which is much better, although still fairly noisy when spinning, due to the way it's mounted. I wish the SSD drives were somewhat cheaper - but I can't see them coming down to a price that I could justify within the next year.

How is the fan noise? Can it run at low CPU useage with fan off?

Yes, it can, and often does run without the fan. However when it does start up, it's very noticeable. I think it would be better if it ran at a constant lower speed, and just revved up a bit when necessary.