A little primer to the problem that is driving me nuts. The Dell Inspiron 9100/XPS laptops have a problem with the thermal controller, called the SMBIOS. The problem is that the GPU fan suddenly spins at full speed and the GPU throttles back. Hitting the key combination, (Function)FN+Z, resets the thermal controller and it retakes control over the GPU fan and unthrottles the GPU. FN+Z+R opens the SMBIOS screen which displays all the sensor information. From there I can also change many of the settings, including disabling its control.(In its place, I would use I8kfanGUI to provide thermal control.)
Picture of the SMBIOS main screen.
http://www.experimentalinsanity.com/gallery/random/SMBIOS?full=1
Configureable stuff: I need help figuring out what the other options are for that have question marks! I know it is a lot, but it might just help come up with a solution to why the thermal controller spazes out.
ISH CPU Throttle - ????
MSR CPU auto throttling - ????
MSR On-Demand clock modulation - ????
Bi-Directional PROCHOT - Disabled
Fan1/2/3 PWM - In hex, can manually change fan speeds. Fan 2 is GPU, Fan 1/3 is chipset and CPU.
BIOS thermal controls - Enable/Disable thermal controls
SMBus temperature dump - ????
Global Read Hexword Threshold - ????
Read Throttling Hexword Maximum - ????
START Read Throttle - ????
Dell also released the latest BIOS for the 9100/XPS that is the A06 revision. This removes the FN+Z/FN+Z+R functions. Which really sucks since you can't manually reset the thermal controller when it freaks out. You can only restart to reset it and I'm not updating to A06 anytime soon.
My quoted text from: http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums...=insp_general&message.id=182546&page=3
"This is my observation of what is going on internally. My problem is limited to the GPU fan.
The thermal controller can't read the GPU temperature and freaks out. It throttles the GPU back as much as possible and sets the fan to high speed. It even does this when my laptop is sitting idle at a desktop and I'm in the freaking bathroom. FN+Z resets the thermal controller and the controller then attempts to reread the GPU probe, which is succesful and it unthrottles the GPU and lowers the fan speed.
I verified this with I8kfanGUI in observer mode. Occassionally it would give me an error it couldn't read the GPU temperature and the GPU would spin up to high speed.
It would seem that either the thermal controller is messing up or the thermal probe on the video card itself periodically fails. If it is the video card's thermal probe, which is built into the GPU core, Dell can't do much to fix besides replace the effected video cards. What they could do is update how the BIOS interacts with the thermal controller and allow it to retry reading temperatures before freaking out."
Picture of the SMBIOS main screen.
http://www.experimentalinsanity.com/gallery/random/SMBIOS?full=1
Configureable stuff: I need help figuring out what the other options are for that have question marks! I know it is a lot, but it might just help come up with a solution to why the thermal controller spazes out.
ISH CPU Throttle - ????
MSR CPU auto throttling - ????
MSR On-Demand clock modulation - ????
Bi-Directional PROCHOT - Disabled
Fan1/2/3 PWM - In hex, can manually change fan speeds. Fan 2 is GPU, Fan 1/3 is chipset and CPU.
BIOS thermal controls - Enable/Disable thermal controls
SMBus temperature dump - ????
Global Read Hexword Threshold - ????
Read Throttling Hexword Maximum - ????
START Read Throttle - ????
Dell also released the latest BIOS for the 9100/XPS that is the A06 revision. This removes the FN+Z/FN+Z+R functions. Which really sucks since you can't manually reset the thermal controller when it freaks out. You can only restart to reset it and I'm not updating to A06 anytime soon.
My quoted text from: http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums...=insp_general&message.id=182546&page=3
"This is my observation of what is going on internally. My problem is limited to the GPU fan.
The thermal controller can't read the GPU temperature and freaks out. It throttles the GPU back as much as possible and sets the fan to high speed. It even does this when my laptop is sitting idle at a desktop and I'm in the freaking bathroom. FN+Z resets the thermal controller and the controller then attempts to reread the GPU probe, which is succesful and it unthrottles the GPU and lowers the fan speed.
I verified this with I8kfanGUI in observer mode. Occassionally it would give me an error it couldn't read the GPU temperature and the GPU would spin up to high speed.
It would seem that either the thermal controller is messing up or the thermal probe on the video card itself periodically fails. If it is the video card's thermal probe, which is built into the GPU core, Dell can't do much to fix besides replace the effected video cards. What they could do is update how the BIOS interacts with the thermal controller and allow it to retry reading temperatures before freaking out."
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