Hello Guys and Girls.
I brought a Swift 3 OLED "SF314-71". Its a nice machine that has a fatal flaw: its fan controller.
The laptop is almost unusable (at least unbearable) because of the fan behavior.
Even a low CPU/GPU load situation like watching Youtube or editing text documents causes the fan to run at a very high speed. Its even worse: the fan starts and stops frequently.
It seems like the fan controller can only do discrete steps, like 1500rpm, 2500rpm, 3000rpm and so on.
While editing a text document (so almost no cpu load) the fan turns on for 7 seconds, and than cycles off after running for 7 seconds. Sadly the start of the fan is also quite annoying as its "violent" the whole machine jerks noticeable and the fan starts with a big "whoosh" sound.
The CPU package temperature is only at 40°C while this is happening. The air that gets blown out of the vents is also close to room temperature, no wonder by such a low fan start temperature.
The same thing happens while watching YouTube in Chrome (so with hardware accelerated VP9 decoding), CPU and GPU load are very low and CPU package temp is also barely reaching 40°C.
I currently have the latest firmware / Bios installed.
Why is it that a 1000$+ laptop from 2023 doesn't have a continuous fan control algorithm that doesn't cause ear bleeding to set in after just 10 minutes of use? All dedicated GPUs produced in the last 10 years have fan controllers that can ramp the fans up slowly and let them run at speeds that cause no sounds at all.
Even if the fan can't run slower (which would be a very bad engineering choice): the 40°C fan start temperature is just way too low. Setting that to something like 75°C would cause no harm and make the laptop silent while watching YouTube.
I can't find any software to make my own fan curve that works with the strange embedded controller chip. Is there anything out there?
Acers own software features a shortcut: fn+f but that does not do anything other than displaying a picture. The actual fan behavior does not change.
TO BE CLEAR: The CPU/GPU is under very low load when that happens- 5-7%. The temperature is also very low, 40°C. The reported package power (HWinfo) is under 7W average indicating that there is no meaningful CPU load at all. Windows task manager is also reporting single digit CPU/GPU utilization.
If I can't get a BIOS/firmware update, I need to return the laptop. Its just unbearable to have a 1000$ piece of tech that uses a fan controller from the late 80s.
Lg Karl
