fan quieting tutorial please

1) noise cancelling headphones
2) Cindy Lauper at even minimal volume will cancel it
3) white noise transmitter

I second the motion

Any ideas on this I would appreciate hearing also. I can only take an hour or so of the fan whine on my 8890 before I start to go insane. How do the rest of you stand it?

Do you feel the fans are making an unusal noise? Like rubbing against something or a loose/bad bearing?

Or is it the "high speed" volume that is bugging you? Some users have had fans go batty on them, and everyone has the high-speed/high-volume fans (especially when gaming), but that's just how the cooling system is.

They are loud laptops, to be sure, but not that much more than any other somewhat-fast laptop.

If you think the fans are abnormally loud or making an odd noise, try and capture an audio clip (PDA's voice-memo works well here) and post it (mp3 is smaller).

-myrkat

Myrkat -

It's a different issue. This is specifically about the small fan on the 8890 on the motherboard just to the left to the RAM sticks. For most 8890's it does not seem to be an issue, but for some of us it is a major problem. Seems to be related to vibrations resonating, becasue if you dismount the fan the noise level when on is fine; as soon as you put it in it's horrible.

See http://sagerforums.com/showthread.php?t=9776 for the thread and a link to the wav file of the sound.

I have yet to find a way to muffle it; I will be trying again this weekend. It was so bad that I've disconnected this fan in the meantime.....

BOSE noise canceling headphones. Only $299 direct.

That's the thread that I posted, along with my fix. That was a few weeks ago, it's still working! You can tell the difference if you listen to these recordings before and after. They use the internal mike with fan on 4sec - off 4sec - on 4sec.

http://home.earthlink.net/~marc46/mls/8890-fan.wav
http://home.earthlink.net/~marc46/ml...-fan-quiet.wav

I also have this pic showing where I placed the foam tape on the fan and on the mounting posts. There's also a 1/2" diameter piece on top of the fan (hidden here since the fan is upside-down). I left the mounting screws out after this operation. This is key since they transmit the vibration that causes the whine. Also they aren't needed as the fan is constrained from going anywhere.

Interesting thread guys. Rondo's fan would have driven me demented. Mine does whine but not like that. I'm now very inclined to give it the same treatment for comparison's sake.

Has anyone lapped and applied arctic silver to an 8890 heatsink and processor to cut the fan duration? Depending on the ambient temperature of the room, the fans, once the computer heats up a bit, is on constantly. I've done searches and there are many 5680's etc who have done this, but I'm curious to hear the opinions of any 8890 owners on the operation.

Franco check out Hanko Panko's posts in this thread for applying AS on an 8890. If you follow the thread down Hanko posted more pics on how he applied the thermal paste.

After listening to the wav files I am starting to wonder if the noise I can hear when my fans start may also be related to this. I will have to investigate more - thanks for the info Rondo.

I just opened up my 8890 and had a look at that fan next to the memory stick.
Whoa, when you unscrew it the noise level drops quite substanially. I decided to do a fix of my own design unlike Rondo's approach I used heat shrink tubing. By cutting two short pieces of heat shrink equal to the length along the edge of the fan and placing them parallel to the front of the laptop and just placing the fan back - ie. leaving the two screw capture screws out entirely, the heat spreader plate acts as a clamp forcing the tubing to squash down an hold the fan in place.

I still have a bit of the high pitched sound but no where near the level it was previously. The system is now just louder than my old Toshiba.

There is more work to do trying to isolate the fan a bit more because the sound still resonates a little bit. I must say though I am really really pleased with what I have achieved so far. We should send this fix back to Sager and Clevo.

Take 2

Well after nearly shorting out my entire system (be very careful in there when you are doing any of these mod's btw - especially if the system is running as I did so I could test out some variations on the mounting), I have probably the ultimate method of making this fan quiet.

What you need is a sheet of that thin poly-ethylene packing material that they use to cover electronic gear with. It is whitish in colour and is 0.25 mm thick. If you cut a square piece 35 x 35 mm, then cut a 28 mm circle inside the square (just use a sharp knife it does not have to be exact) you will end up with what looks like a square shim with a hole in the centre.

Turn your machine off (Rondo and did the hard bit of testing all this so you guys get it easy ), remove the keyboard and heat spreader. As per Rondo's pic the fan is secured by two Philips head screws. Undo these and store them some place safe (you will not be needing them). Carefully place the polyethylene shim so that hole is clear and the corners of the square shim are covering the mounting posts of the fan. You will notice in Rondo's pic he has placed little pieces of foam against the posts. With the polyethelene sheet you will not need to do this because when you replace the fan it will force the sheet down between the post and the outer frame of the fan, thus mechanically isolating it from the motherboard.

Carefully hold one corner of the shim in place with a pair of tweezers and push the fan back into place. You may need to adjust the shim slightly so both corners are packed correctly. You should notice that the fan is securely held in place by the polyethelene shim against its mounting posts. DO NOT replace the mounting screws. The heat spreader will hold the fan in place.

The whole idea is to mechanically isolate the fan from the motherboard. If you listen to Rondo's wav files using Windows media player and set your view to bars (effectively a fourier transform into the frequency domain) you can see the fundamental frequency that the fan resonates at. It is this that we want to dampen by use of "accoustic shock absorbers". The shim, or my original pieces of heat shrink tubing or Rondo's foam all act to decouple the fan's resonance from the motherboard.

Since making the mod to the fan my system has quitened down considerably. I can now even hear the hissing air in the pipes during the intro of the ATI Pipe Dream graphics demo program.

After running with this mod on my internal fan for a couple of hours now, I have to say anyone with an 8890 should take the time to do it .

Rondo you are da man . Thanks for taking the time to do the initial research on this, every 8890 owner should bow down at your feet.

I've been quite happy with my "foam tape" fix. Now my 8890 is about the same as many desktop systems. I mean sound-wise. Performance-wise, it's faster - of course.

I am hoping for one more sound improvement. That is Henrik's fabled fan controler. My preference would be for the fan to run more but at a slower speed. This would be feasible much of the time since the fan runs only about a 30% duty cycle. Wouldn't work during games though, since they cause an increase in both the fan speed and duty cycle.

I now have another problem - I can now hear my old Toshiba and its fans . My system is soooo good now.

About the only other thing I would do Rondo is do the Artic Silver or Shin Etsu G751 thermal compound change over on the CPU. I will probably do that when I dismantle the system to insert the second 7200 RPM disk.

My question is, what is that little fan next to the memory stick for? It doesn't appear to have a purpose in life... What does it cool?

It pulls air from under the mobo and forces it across the first memory stick and then the second memory stick transfers the heat load up thru the thermal contact pad into the metal heat spreader just below the keyboard. It has a very important role in keeping these systems cool. I will be interested to see what the power load of a 1MB memory stick is. That will be the real test of these systems.

hm... perhaps I'll try that sometime. Is that polyethylene foam material the thick version, about 1 mm thick also ok? I don't think I have the ultra-thin .25mm stuff...

The foam tape I used is 1.5mm thick. It's in the picture earlier in this thread. You can see it's open-cell, pretty lightweight stuff.