Is fan speed setting to 100% good for notebooks?

I have a Dell studio 1555 laptop with Core2 Duo CPU & ATI Radeon 4500 series GPU. I run Windows 7.

Recently, when I boot my laptop, I foud it missing its display and I took it to a laptop service center. The technician told me that it was due to laptop heating and is a common fault. Then he made a hot air blow to GPU chips, and after cooling, the display came back. Then I told him to set fan speed to 100% to prevent over heating in future. Since there was no option for fan speed in BIOS, he made it manually.

Is this a good practice to set notebook fan speed to 100%? Will this setting prevent my notebook from overheating in future? Will I encounter with the same trouble again?

blasteralfred Ψ

Posted 2013-09-04T03:06:33.877

Reputation: 620

No, rather it is a good practice to keep the lint blown out so the fan only runs when necessary and at the speed the system chooses to keep the temps down. Running at 100% through a dust bunny trapped in the heat sink just makes noise and sucks more dirt in. While it's thrilling to hear all that noise and think it's accomplishing something, you actually aren't doing anything useful at all. – Fiasco Labs – 2013-09-04T03:27:05.157

Answers

Generally it is not necessary. Laptops are engineered to keep cool, and thinks like cool-and-quiet and variable fan speeds keep the power and fan levels just about right.

The biggest problem I see with laptop design, is that the fans have a long exhaust route. The exhaust tends to fill with dust (sometimes hair) and that disrupts the cooling. To some extent this is a non-issue as the fans will spin a little faster to compensate.

Best bet is to occasionally blow out the fans and exhaust (and intake when there is an obvious one). This will keep the airflow as designed and do more good than an always 100% fan, which may keep the laptop cooler (good), but also drain the battery faster.

Austin T French

Posted 2013-09-04T03:06:33.877

Reputation: 9 766

1Just as a side note to this good answer, you should use canned air (or similar) to "blow out" the fans. If you try to use your mouth to blow out the fans, you could accidentally spit into the chassis, or it won't be powerful enough to do the job. You can usually pick up canned air at electrics stores at reasonable prices. – David – 2013-09-04T04:47:31.270