Aspire XC 885 fan comes on and goes off within seconds

akerbeltz

I'm beginning to think there's an inherent problem with Acers and fans. I have an older Acer Aspire 5742 laptop which I'm running on Ubuntu and it has a fan issue where the fan comes on every few seconds, runs like mad for a few seconds, then goes off for a few seconds. I just put that down to the fact that it's older and maybe a driver issue in Ubuntu. But I've just finished setting up a new Aspire XC 885 and to my susprise, am getting a very similar issue. It seems to come on either when I'm running a lot of stuff at the same time or installing stuff - but oddly also when it goes into screensaver (running World Community Grid BOINC client, so that may be causing that).

What I'm annoyed with is not the fact that the fan runs - if it needs cooling, it needs cooling - but it's bizarre for it to run only maybe 2 seconds, go off 4 seconds, run 2 seconds etc etc ad nauseum. I can't imagine that it's supposed to cool in such a stop-and-go manner. Any ideas what needs tweaking? On the new XC 885, not my old laptop.

billsey

Likely the chipset drivers aren't quite up to the PID control that regulates fan speed based on CPU temp. The drivers for your flavor of Linux are just doing a simple fuzzy logic control, turn it on at x temp, turn it off at y temp, and the difference between x and y is too low to cycle slowly.