Laptop Fan Noise - What are your good or bad experiences?

[xbow]

Hi!

So I bought a Thinkpad T14s (Ryzen 7 CPU) which I love, were it not for the fan noise. It isn't even very loud nor does the device get very hot. But besides the whoosh of the air, the fan produces a whining tone at around 4 kHz that I find highly annoying, and that I can still sometimes hear when mixing at low to moderate volumes, even through (open-back) headphones. I also find it highly annoying when the room is silent.

Furthermore, the noise is not constant, but the fan will switch off, on, and vary in speed, at moderate workloads, which will alter the frequency of the pitched noise. And I am not talking about big projects that drive the CPU (which is highly overpowered for a DAW) to its limits.

Objectively speaking, the big tower PC that sits under my desk is probably much louder, but the big fans don't produce noise in this spectrum and run at a constant speed, so I find them far less intrusive and easier to ignore.

So I will probably return this device, it was far too expensive to put up with this annoyance. But it might not be easy to find a replacement, so...

What are your experiences with laptop fan noise?

Any (recent) brands/models you can recommend or advise against?

Specifically, do you know any laptop fans that are audible, but 'clean' (without whine)?

[excuse me please]

I don't think one completely can get rid of background noise. Then again, if things sound good, it's because they stand out from the background noise.

[GaryG]

The HP I'm currently using has a very low level 'hum' that's pretty much inaudible when you move a metre or so away. That's a 7th gen i5 so probably not as efficient as the ryzen (ie. needs more cooling). So, I'm wondering if the whine is a flaw, I don't recall any laptops at work (IT support) whining like that that didn't have dodgy fans.

[xbow]

I don't think one completely can get rid of background noise. Then again, if things sound good, it's because they stand out from the background noise.

Imagine white/pink noise. That's background noise I could probably ignore. My fan adds something resembling a 4kHz sine wave on top of that. It is very low volume, but somehow sticks out from the background noise

[mgw38]

Laptop fans will quite often emit a whining noise. There isn‘t much you can do about that. However, you can manually control the fan speed, either with third party software or by tinkering with the power savings settings. But this is a performance/noise tradeoff. The less the fans work the hotter the system gets and if the system gets too hot it will throttle performance.

[mjstonehome]

There is a free piece of software called "notebook fancontrol" it obviously wont physically change the sound of your fan, but it will allow you to manually set how fast they are spinning. Not having fan noise in your audio is of course best, but if you are trying to do noise removal later, a constant-speed fan noise will be somewhat easier to deal with than one that varies speeds across the duration of a recording.

[echosystm]

Buy an M1 MacBook or MacBook Pro. The MacBook will be silent (it's fanless) and the MacBook Pro will be quiet. Performance per dollar will also be higher than any Windows laptop.

[BONES]

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Oh, that was funny. Funniest thing I've read all year. My Windows laptop cost Au$1680 (~US$1300), brand new with a full warranty, and it runs a hexa-Core i7 CPU, has 32GB of RAM, one 256GB NVMe SSD, a secondary 1TB SATA SSD and an nVidia RTX2060 GPU. Now, to build an equivalent MB Pro, I'd need to go to 2TB because they only have one drive slot, and I'd have to put up with the inferior performance of a Radeon GPU, but CPU and RAM would be identical. And do you know how much it would cost? Au$5299. In case you're maths isn't that great, we're talking THREE TIMES THE PRICE FOR ALMOST IDENTICAL PERFORMANCE. I'm sure you can see how laughable that makes your claim. And that's before we look at the clearly superior warranty I get from Dell and the fact that I can upgrade my laptop myself, without voiding the warranty. OR the fact that if I bought a Mac, I would have to compromise on things like the screen-res and ports. (Mine has 3 x USB 3, TB 3, HDMI, DisplayPort, Ethernet and SD card ports, most of which are in use.)

[RugerioDelStereo]

My 13" Macbook Pro, 16GB i5 from 2018 has fans (well, Bones is not a fan, obviously ), but it is very quiet. Never hear it, even when working with 20+ tracks and lots of plugins on Logic Pro.

[arkmabat]

While I have no need to discuss specific hardware, I will say that fan noise can cover GPU squealing which is a benefit, not a negative thing. The bummer about a laptop in general is that if it makes a funny noise, it's a lot harder to isolate than with a desktop, and by the very nature of it, you'll be closer to the loud parts than with a desktop. People overcome this by wearing headphones and even hot-gluing components inside their laptop, though I don't recommend this without further research. You might also check your power settings to see if you can get more control there. Many laptops have a CPU-boost feature that turns on and off, just depending. You can most likely can get your fans to turn on at a constant rate and have them stay there at max or something if that's less distracting than the on/off. It is likely that cheap laptops are noisier than more expensive ones, but given the large gap, I'm okay saving thousands of dollars to put up with a little fan or gpu noise.

[BONES]

To be clear, the fans from my laptop give my fridge a run for its money but the fan in my Surface Pro is almost silent (and it's much older). I think it's just luck of the draw. If the laptop is under warranty, you could maybe insist that they do something about it but I'm not sure what Lenovo are like with that kind of thing.

[thecontrolcentre]

My first couple of laptops (Acer Aspire & HP Pavilion) were pretty noisy, but my current 3XS i7 with 3 SSDs is almost silent.

[echosystm]

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Oh, that was funny. Funniest thing I've read all year. My Windows laptop cost Au$1680 (~US$1300), brand new with a full warranty, and it runs a hexa-Core i7 CPU, has 32GB of RAM, one 256GB NVMe SSD, a secondary 1TB SATA SSD and an nVidia RTX2060 GPU. Now, to build an equivalent MB Pro, I'd need to go to 2TB because they only have one drive slot, and I'd have to put up with the inferior performance of a Radeon GPU, but CPU and RAM would be identical. And do you know how much it would cost? Au$5299. In case you're maths isn't that great, we're talking THREE TIMES THE PRICE FOR ALMOST IDENTICAL PERFORMANCE. I'm sure you can see how laughable that makes your claim. And that's before we look at the clearly superior warranty I get from Dell and the fact that I can upgrade my laptop myself, without voiding the warranty. OR the fact that if I bought a Mac, I would have to compromise on things like the screen-res and ports. (Mine has 3 x USB 3, TB 3, HDMI, DisplayPort, Ethernet and SD card ports, most of which are in use.)

Lol triggered. Find me a PC with equivalent price/performance to an M1 MacBook Air that doesn't sound like a jet taking off. I'll wait.

I'm guessing you have the Dell G7, with a 6 core i7-10750H? Here is the performance difference.

Single core: 1140 vs 1740 (52% faster)
Multi core: 5470 vs 7640 (39% faster)

The MacBook Air is $375US cheaper, is faster by about 2 entire generations, is silent and doesn't look like a piece of crap from the 90s. I feel sorry for you man. You got scammed.

[xbow]

Thanks for all the feedback.

Macbooks do have their advantages, but Mac OS is not an option for me, let's leave it at that .

Lenovo partners are generally quite accommodating. I did send in the T14s to have the fan swapped, let's see if that will make a difference. I do have a T14 (without the -s) from work to compare, which does not emit the whining noise, but this could be due to the different enclosure, which is a bit sturdier and rubber-coated and seems to absorb more of that high-pitched noise.

I looked at some of the tools suggested. Ryzen Controller seems quite capable of throttling the CPU to a level where it doesn't get warm enough to trigger the fan, but it is the GPU that seems to produce most of the heat anyway, when running GPU-intensive interfaces (like Vital and VCV Rack).

[echosystm]

If you need to stay with Windows, I would be looking at something with a Ryzen 5000 CPU. The current generation matches or exceeds the performance of Intel, but with a third of the TDP. Intel has fallen way behind.

The thermal design of the laptop is probably the bigger issue though. Generic PC laptops are thrown together. You really need to buy the flagship products, to get something that has had any thought put into it.

You could also look into making a sound absorbing enclosure for the laptop, when using it at your desk.