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XPS 8950, fan speed
I have a Dell XPS 8950 (i7-12700, 32GB DDR5, 1TB SSD, 2TB HDD, GeForce RTX 3080 10GB, 750W PSU), purchased 7/19/2023. Sometime in the last few months I began having issues with excessive fan speed/noise correlating with even the smallest increase in processing demand, eg copying a 1 GB mp4 video from one HDD directory to another. I understand the need for increased cooling with sustained high processing loads but not for moderate/small tasks. The noise rivals a jet engine taking off. Is there a way to rein-in this excessive fan speed? I suspect that some driver or bios update in the last few months has caused the thermal management to change in ways I don't like.
RoHe
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February 15th, 2024 01:08
Sometimes, a corrupted video card driver can cause the (CPU) fan to run wild. So you might want to uninstall the NVidia video driver and install the latest version from Dell's support site.
You may want to run DDU (free) to remove all traces of the old NVidia driver before installing the new NVidia driver. So be sure to download the driver from Dell's site before you run DDU.
You want to run DDU in Safe Mode with the network connection disabled. Then install the replacement driver before re-connecting the network connection, otherwise, Windows Update might interfere and install the wrong driver.
smokeygraypoupon
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February 13th, 2024 23:17
Have you taken the side panel off to determine which fan or fans have increased the fan speed/noise? Certainly appears to be a cooling issue at this point.
smokeygraypoupon
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February 14th, 2024 14:43
I am not aware of a setting in the BIOS to change the fan curves. You might use HWMonitor or HWinfo64 to look at the CPU temps under load. My wife's XPS 8950 with a i7-12700 would run hot with the Dell "box" CPU cooler. I cleaned and repasted the CPU, installed a Dell tower CPU cooler and the system ran much cooler and quieter (virtually silent).
Hope this helps.
the bbdude
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February 15th, 2024 16:51
Thanks for your responses smokeygraypoupon & RoHe. I haven't gotten around to taking off the side panel to determine which fan was running extremely fast.
I did, last night go to the Dell site support for my XPS 8950 service tag and downloaded the latest NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20xx/30xx/40xx Studio Graphics Driver (most recent update was 2/8/2024. I installed this. This seems to have solved the problem. I am no longer getting elevated fan speed/noise for minor/moderate processing scenarios. Thanks RoHe.
Interesting that the Dell SupportAssist App never found that the NVIDIA driver was in need of update, even though it has run the Update Software task several times since 2/8/2024.
RoHe
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February 15th, 2024 19:34
Glad you got it resolved...
Sounds like the old NVidia driver (pun intended!) may have gotten corrupted, or it possibly wasn't fully compatible with the Dell OEM RTX 3080, if it was installed by Windows Update rather than by SupportAssist/Dell Update.
FWIW, SupportAssist/Dell Update tend to lag behind in offering driver updates that were only recently posted on the support site. So may not be surprising the NVidia driver posted on 2-8-24 hadn't offered to you.