Satellite P300 - fan is always running

Question

Hi ,
This is my first Toshiba laptop and is a very good product in every part, but the noise is to high !
I have compared it with a little more expensive notebook using the same CPU and equivalent video card from Nvidia (9600).
With the other notebook the fan is inaudible when you don't play a game or charge the CPU, with the Toshiba the fan never stop!
This is very painful when you use it for many hours ...
I have underclocked the CPU to 800 Mhz and activate the energy saver for the ATI card in the control panel , like is in battery mode.
But no chance after 4/5 minutes the fans start and never stop , just the desktop started and doing nothing grrr
The CPU is 39/40 degree and the fan cool cool and cool again , some time stop for 10 seconds when it reach 37 degre and start again for long long time :(
With a processor reduced at 800 Mhz and a 3D graphic card doing nothing in reduced mode is not normal to have this level of noise. Another laptops with the same component inside don't have this problem.
I thing a bios update is needed to change the threshold when the second level of fan speed start, 40 degree is not so hot for a CPU !
I'm thinking to change it if Toshiba don't do nothing about that.
Hope some engineer listen me please, its a good
very goord laptop and so beautiful.
Kind regards and Merry Christmas,
Patrick

Answer 1

There "is" a solution to this problem but no one is going to like it as the problem is very similar to what happened to the very first Sony Playstation 3 model which suffered from a simple flaw but with the devastating yellow light of death results. Most of Toshiba's laptops suffer from a bad heat sink compound so the heat isn't being transferred effectively from the cpu/gpu to the heat sink thus causing the fan to overcompensate. I discovered this after my p300-1cn conveniently started going wrong after the warranty expired.
First the fan started overworking itself which in turn caused it to start getting noisier and noisier. Then the teltale signs the fan was on it's way out. (Then the mouse started freezing which was explained by the shared processors fighting to get rid of the heat.)Being an experienced pc boffin I thought it would be a 10 minute job just like changing the heatsink in a standard pc so I contacted Toshiba who happily put me in touch with their component supplier and a week and 40 later I had a new cooling fan with heatsink. It was then I discovered not only did both the cpu and gpu share the same heatsink, but replacing this thing ended up being a 6 hour job because even with the disassembly guide I found on the internet, I had to disassemble every single component to get to the cooling fan.
I did note that the thermal compound pads didn't look great on either the old or the new heatsink but once I had it fitted and everything put back together again I had total silence and a massive jump in performance and speed in my laptop. That was 4 years ago and it's just recently started getting noisy again but meaning this time I'll have to change just the thermal compound this time but now I know what I'm doing, all it's going to cost this time will be a 5 tube of arctic silver thermal compound reapplied to the heatsink as the fan although overworked at the moment, is still healthy.
So in a nutshell if your fan becomes overactive, then the thermal compound requires changing.