SUSE 9.3 AMD64 reduce fan speed, cool'n quiet
 

Hi,

I have just installed SUSE 9.3 (64bit version) on an AMD64 with Asus A8N-E mother board. All works fine but the fan is running at full speed all the time. How can I make the SUSE control the fan speed (and thus reduce it when the machine is running idle) or use the cool'n quiet option that the bios does seem to support?

Thanks for any input!

cool'n quiet will slow down CPU to 50%. Only when compiling CPU will run at full speed. So if you have 1.8GHz it will run at 900MHz.
I never knew how it works, sometimes fan speed is controlled (0 at temp 30C and full speed at 39C), recently however fan runs at full speed even CPU temp is 32C. It does not bother me that much because it is guiet.

Thanks for your response. Mine is not that quiet (if you have any tips on quiet fans I'm all ear!) and I really want to find a way to bring down the noise level! I know the hardware should support that but I just don't know how to make it work with SUSE 9.3!

You need to turn on cool'n'quite in your bios. Suse will pick that up and then you can control/adjust it.
If you can't turn it on in your bios, then you are out of luck -- as I am.

I have indeed turned it on in my bios! Maybe SUSE even picks it up, it's just that my computer is NOT quiet. So either the name is misleading (and I had my hopes up for nothing) or SUSE is not picking it up (how do I check this?). Anyway, the main issue is the noise level (my fan runs like crazy always), cool'n quiet was just something I ran across in my bios settings and the name insinuates that it could do some good. Any other tips for change of hardware/software/bios/settings are very welcome!!

Start here:
http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/d...nage.acpi.html

go to Yast, system, powermanagement & set it up. It's all a function of how hard you are driving your CPU Use acoustic, throtling, etc = mess around

look at each with: cd to /proc/whatever then cat /proc/whatever.
to change them:
learn the echo command in the same chapter: echo /proc/whatever=something as root.
or in Yast:
System, /etc/sysconfig editor, but first read the book.

Have fun

With cool'nquite enabled your CPU will run with half of the speed as I explained earlier.

Thanks for the advise! I had already been playing with the SUSE settings but this had no effect. Yesterday I finally decided to have another look at the hardware configuration. I found that the noise is really due to the chassis fans (not the CPU or chipset fans). The reason that they do not slow down was that they were connected to the wrong power plugs on the motherboard (not the ones that are controlled by Q-Fan (ASUS)). Changing that has helped a little (the ASUS motherboard had only one Q-FAN controlled plug for the chassis fans so now I am running with a single chassis fan instead of 2 which probably gave most of the noise reduction) and the noise level is down to an acceptable one. It is still not the way I like it but I don't suppose there is much room for improvement left. At least I am not waking up the neighbours anymore when I am working late:)!