SOLVED: gpu fan not running at all (Nvidia 7600 Go, Vista 32)

[Guest BillyBones]

Sure, 60 degrees aren't bad, but I have them when I'm surfing internet, using word... nothing that makes the GPU work.

When I start rendering, the temperature rises until the laptop switches off without any warning. And this is a problem because I need this computer for working reasons and a render tooks about 4 hours to get ready. You can understand that losing any time 4 hours of work is creating me a lot of problem.

Moreover, my laptop is a HP pavillion dv9000 and it should have both fans, on cpu and gpu.

I don't know what to do actually, because even right now my keypads are so hot that touching them is a bit discomforting. Luckily, I have another desktop pc, but when I'm around for working reason, I can rely only on my laptop and you have already listen my sad experience with it.

Anyway, thank you for your reply... I'll keep on checking this topic, hoping someone will found a solution.

Hi, Esus!

In short - get 'SpeedFan' and launch the program multiple times - it may activate the fans.

In long - here's my story:

I also use my Fujitsu Siemens Amilo 1526 for rendering and AutoCAD at work. I also have the nVidia Geforce Go 7600 and I also have/had this fan problem. When I run everest, it monitors the various temperatures of the computer: CPU, CPU#1, CPU#1, GPU, HDD and so on. I realised, that all of the temperatures updated themselves regularly, except for the CPU one. When under stress (from rendering for example), the temperatures would rise quickly and the laptop would feel physically hot, but the CPU temperature would not rise and the fan would not activate.

Sometimes just by waiting a while, the CPU temperature sensor would just 'catch up' with the others and depending on how high the temperature was the fan would speed up accordingly. I realised that one way of trying to make the computer manually update the CPU temperature sensor was by rebooting. This made me wonder what happens during reboot that causes the dang sensor to update.

I found a working, albeit still utterly stupid, solution. I got ahold of the program 'SpeedFan', in hopes of using that to adjust the fans. The program doesn't recognise the fans though, either because this is a laptop computer or just an OEM in general. I thought it was useless, BUT... upon launching the program it appears to do some checking of your fans/computer in general and at some point it does (i think) something that happens on reboot as well, and there's a chance that the CPU temperature sensor will update. It's the most bizarre thing!

I don't know if it will work for you, but i've been surviving like this for a good 10-11 months now. Remember that launching the program once may not update the sensor, but after 2-3 it usually catches on. You can clearly see it in Everest or any other program with the temperature sensors, CPU may be 50, while the others are climbing 80-90; you launch SpeedFan a few times; suddenly the CPU catches up, shows arond 90 as well; the computer's fan goes raving mad. Of course, the opposite is also true then. Suppose the rendering ends; the sensors go down to 50-60 but the CPU sensor is still 90 and thus the fan is still on full. Launching SpeedFan will, again, update the CPU sensor, but by this time your computer may have cooled down so much that at the next temperature <50, the fan will probably turn off completely, at which point the temperatures rise again, and it's up to you, stupidly enough, to keep updating the CPU sensor so the damn fan would work.

I've found that if i get the fan to run at around the 60°C mark, it will keep the computer at that temperature, but not 'overcool it'. As soon as i render or play games though, the fan's not powerful enough. This can be especially annoying when say, launching Team Fortress 2 - a game that takes long to alt + tab out of. I start playing, the temperature rises way up to 90-100 and i have to alt + tab for a painfully long time to run SpeedFan just so the CPU sensor would catch up and the fan would run.

I'm so disappointed in this dang laptop. What's more is that it comes with a 'fan silencing' buttong. I've looked in Everest though, and when i press that button, all it does is forcefully half-clock my computer from 2Ghz to 1Ghz, and even THAT will not help in the longrun because if the fan is off, the temperatures will inevitably creep up to the 70s and at some point the CPU sensor will update itself and then the fan is friggin' loud.

Frustrating, embarrasing, disapointing.

[Chronicburn]

So the gpu fan problem has been solved here in Vista, by a rather questionable means ..

What I did is reinstalled XP on a separate partition to make sure I was not suffering some sort of hardware defect. gpu fan as expected working fine in XP. Then booted into Vista, and baaannng - gpu fan even working in Vista. Turned the Laptop off, waited, booted Vista again, but this time without booting into XP before that, gpu fan still working.

Now, with the driver 169.25 for Vista 32bit which I recommend for the Toshiba Satellite P100-102 (and most likely others of the 1xx series) with the 7600 Go at this time (June 26, 2008), the temp is staying in the low 50s °C as in XP, and when running benchmarks not going above 65 (66 in XP).

Hard to believe, but XPs different ACPI moddel must have revived s.th. somewhere on my mobo (BIOS/ CMOS) that got stuck either in Vista or Mac OS x86, and could not be revived by reinstalling Vista onto that test partition.

The version of XP I installed is the one from MSDN with SP3 included. I also installed the latest Intel Chipset driver 9.x + Nvidia driver 162.18 WHQL international. No idea if these components were important, too, for triggering the gpu fan to finally kick in in Vista.

So anybody else with this kind of prob: try installing XP on a different volume, make sure the gpu fan works (just do a grafics benchmark test like the one in nTune and it should run), and check in Vista if it runing there then, too.

Thanks everybody for your input; I will post in here as soon as I have heard anything about my BIOS.

:)

I'm trying your solution atm, i must say i dont understand why nvidia can't fix such

BIOS/CMOS errors in vista? :)

When im done installing my dualboot i will post back to say if it worked or not

EDIT: I installed XP on a dualboot, but that didnt solve my problem, GPU fan is still not working, (only when i boot up my pc before it loads vista or any other os) i also formatted my laptop and installed Vista Home Premium 32bit(i needed to format anyway), so that i might see if it was a problem with unsigned driver in 64-bit. But still.. my fan is not working... :P

As i still have a full warranty on my notebook (it was bought via a company with a full warranty), i'll try to make toshiba fix my fan (as that is a "defect" in my hardware)(and if they cant fix it, put another GPU in it).

Btw, any news from your bios? Is it supposed to fix the GPU Fan problem? Please reply ASAP as i need to know if i send my laptop to Toshiba or not

Edited November 1, 2008 by Chronicburn

[Guest Michael]

My OS is XP. I've tried all your methods and my fan still doesnt work :/ If someone have a solution please POST IT! BIOS 2.4v helps?

[Chronicburn]

My OS is XP. I've tried all your methods and my fan still doesnt work :/ If someone have a solution please POST IT! BIOS 2.4v helps?

Only try this if you have a toshiba laptop!

I browsed the Toshiba support forums, and there are quite a lot incidents with broken fans/fans not working

some of them say, send your laptop back if you have a warranty, if you dont have a warranty anymore, degrading to a Bios V4.0 or lower should help (i didnt try it!), but beware! Bios V.4.0 or lower will, according to toshiba tech support forums, fix your fan problem, but that bios version has loads of other bugs as well.

Edited November 10, 2008 by Chronicburn

[Wagnard]

I have also a Toshiba P100 and this is no fix... its only a workaround. I do however have another workaround.

GO in vista and use an intensive application to let the gpu eat up to 105c (may take a few minutes to do it.

Once its done, there seem to be some kind of emergency fan kcikup thats its done.

The laptop fan will alway work in full speed unless you remove power and your battery or if you boot in XP.

Anyone else found a way to overclock the GPU of this laptop after the 17x.xx driver release??

Edited November 20, 2008 by Wagnard

[Guest SomeDude]

I currently have the canadian Toshiba P100 (pspa3c-ma202c) with vista installed. Tried your work-around with dual booting xp (after a hell of a lot of effort) and gpu fan still does not work in windows vista. Of course, the gpu fan works in XP just fine. Damn Toshiba!

[Guest Guest]

I've finally found a fix to this thread's problem. You have to extract the dsdt table, fix it, then replace the broken one. I did this using ubuntu because I have no idea how to do it in vista 32 (the os seems inherently averse to any modifications like this). I used wubi to install ubuntu to a separate partition on my hd (it's just like installing a windows application); then I followed the fix to the dsdt table at this address:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=771223

The gpu fan worked in ubuntu after applying this fix, and I was really surprised to find the gpu fan working in vista 32 too! Now my fan and graphics card work as they should have a long time ago.

My specs

Toshiba pspa3c-ma202c

geforce go 7600 128mb

BTW, I recommend nvidia's newest mobile graphics driver on their site:

www.nvidia.com

Even though it's a beta driver for notebooks, it has graphics settings for vista (ie sharpness, vibrance etc) and isn't stupidly useless like toshiba's latest 9.7.5.4 from a year ago.