3

I wish to know if anybody from here owns too a Gigabyte Aero 15 laptop and if he/she can control the fans.
This laptop is from 2017, with a 7th gen. Intel Core i7-7700HQ and an Nvidia GTX 1060 with 6Gb. This is an awesome laptop, thin, compact, lightweight yet at the same time powerfull and a long-lasting battery life.
I'm very happy with it, except that I can't control the fans when running Ubuntu, meanwhile this is possible under Windows 10.
I want to know if it's possible to control the fans under Ubuntu since it gets pretty hot under some load using this OS.
Except that quirk and some others: some Fn keys doesn't work at all, and when connecting an external monitor Grub does not show (I suspect this is a problem between Intel and Nvidia GPUs).
I'm pretty happy using Ubuntu but if I could control the fans it would be perfect, the Fn keys problem can be easy to solve with mapping that function keys to another custom keyboard shortcut, and since I only use Ubuntu and Windows 10, it's easy to remember the Grub menu too.
So my main issue are the fans.
Could anyone guide to know if I can control the fans, please?

Thank you in advance!

Carlos Martínez Medina
  • 31
  • I have exactly the same machine and same issue on Ubuntu 18.04.1. It gets too hot, the fan reacts to the temperature but not enough. The CPU can get to above 90 degrees, and the fans are still at ~70%. It makes the machine really not safe to use on Ubuntu. – José Manuel Aug 07 '18 at 08:51

2 Answers2

4

After trying a bunch of things I managed to get the manual fan control over Gigabyte Aero 15 running Linux Mint.

In my case there was already some basic automatic fan speed control, but when I was running Tensorflow scripts heavily using GPU, for some reason the fans were clearly not running at their maximum speed (simply they were much less noisy than in Windows) and the laptop heated too much. So I just wanted to be able to set the maximum speed manually, same as hitting Fn+Esc in Windows.

Firstly, nbfc with Gigabyte AERO 14KV8 config works perfectly (at the time of writing there was no specific Aero 15 config). nbfc is a powerful tool allowing for manual and fully automatic temperature-based fan control. However, nbfc is written in C#, so you need to install Mono runtime environment to be able to run .NET on linux. For a simple manual fan control this may be a bit overkill.

The second option I found is p37-ec, a compact program fit in a single C file with no dependencies offering some fan control features for another Gigabyte laptop model. While it was properly metering the temperature and the fan speed, to get it working to actually control the fans by setting the EC registers values I needed to dig a bit more, namely to look at the working nbfc config. The following bash script using p37-ec allows to set manually the speed of the both fans:

echo "Type fan speed in 0..229 range or leave empty to switch back to auto:"
read spd
if [ -z "$spd" ]
then
    ./p37ec 6 0
else    
    ./p37ec 6 30
    ./p37ec 0xb0 $spd
    ./p37ec 0xb1 $spd
fi

Notes.

  • This requires superuser mode.
  • If you use this, be aware of possible overheating issues when manually setting low fan speed for a long time.
lnstadrum
  • 151
  • 1
    This is still working with an AORUS 15 YC, kudos! The critical part (besides finding p37ec) is the 6 register going to 0 in order to grab control (or relinquish it). I'm mostly using it because this beast gets hot when I'm asking a lot of it, and those fans are still mostly at 3k RPM. Periodic blasts of 6k rpm on the fans and my legs are much happier. Thanks! – Mike Hardy Aug 19 '21 at 21:15
0

I have the AERO15 running Ubuntu 17.10.

Keyboard:

There have been a number of issues with the keyboard from ghosting to standard combinations not working. Ultimately I sent mine in and they tried to argue that mapping the FN key to the desired keyboard combination (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S in my case) is the only possible solution. After some arguing they exchanged the keyboard, but the ghosting issues remained.

GPU:

I did post about this on Reddit a while back and the gist of it was

Both of the fans on the aero are connected to both the CPU and the GPU, so there is no dedicated GPU fan (as far as I can tell by looking at the heatpipes). I did verify that my fans spun up when I put a load on the GPU as well.

So much for controlling the GPU. I have tried using Nvidia-Prime to select whigh GPU (dedicated or integrated) is being used but I kept on getting logged out straight away.

I've also tried using the power config tool to set the fan speeds myself but pwm-config always claimed that no specific modules (fans to control) were available.

Ultimately I have opted for disabling the GPU in the BIOS if I don't need it. I will probably sell it once I'm done with my studies and get myself an XPS15 without an NVIDIA card and just a separate Desktop pc for Games.

Daniel Einars
  • 21
  • Thank you. I don't plan to sell it, despite this problems is an awesome machine, and I know that a desktop PC is far better than a laptop for gaming, but I move everyday and sometimes I meet my friends to play games together in the same house. With the grub, I do not boot anymore the laptop attached to the external screen, so I "solved" that problem and it actually boots lots faster, it seems that if I connect an external monitor, it involves a GPU switching meanwhile booting and it's painfully slow (both OSes). Anyways thank you for your answer. – Carlos Martínez Medina Apr 19 '18 at 18:17