How do I use fancontrol on HP Elitebook 8560w?

Question

I have an HP EliteBook 8560w running on Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) that for just running Firefox I get 60 degrees Celsius and when running Eclipse IDE or Blender for example I get around 75 degrees and sometimes over 80. I tried installing lm-sensors and fan control, but it didn't work. I couldn't find anything useful on Google.

Below is my sensors output:

acpitz-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1:        +75.0°C  (crit = +128.0°C)
temp2:        +73.0°C  (crit = +128.0°C)
temp3:        +61.0°C  (crit = +128.0°C)
temp4:        +45.0°C  (crit = +128.0°C)
temp5:        +29.0°C  (crit = +128.0°C)
temp6:         +0.0°C  (crit = +128.0°C)

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Physical id 0:  +75.0°C  (high = +86.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0:         +72.0°C  (high = +86.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:         +75.0°C  (high = +86.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 2:         +72.0°C  (high = +86.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 3:         +73.0°C  (high = +86.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

Answer 1

These laptops are known for having noisy fans because they are in the workstation class where performance is more important than noise or comfort. This means that even at the best of times they will make noise and put out often scary amounts of heat. They need to be used on flat smooth surfaces with as much airflow as possible around them and always with the lid up.

A bit of googling suggests that newer BIOSes and fan control software will have limited effect although it's worth checking if the fan control options in the BIOS are not set to always on.

The real issue appears to be bad thermal paste between the CPU and the cooler. This has the effect of preventing heat from escaping as fast as expected and making the fans work harder that they should to make up for the difference.

Here is a video that shows someone replacing the thermal paste on that laptop. It's a bit fiddly, but these laptops are designed to be reasonably serviceable so it's not insanely difficult, but there are of course risks such as static damage and loosing or breaking tiny parts. At your own risk obviously. See HP Elitebook 8560w/8570w Disassembly and thermal compound paste replacement, разборка (YouTube).

Another solution is to get a laptop cooling pad to sit underneath it. These typically have much larger fans at slow speed that make far less noise and vibration, but they can massively improve the air flow to the laptop and prevent the heat building up in the first place.

Answer 2

I also have a Elitebook 8570W with Ubuntu 16.04. To reduce the noise from fans, I follow this steps :

1.Disable the BIOS option : Fan always on

2.Clean heatsink and change the thermal paste (choose a good one)

3.FanControl doesn't work, instead I install nbfc software (https://github.com/hirschmann/nbfc)

4.I setup config file of nbfc to let CPU temperature climb to 78°C (instead of around 55°c by default)

So the Fan is running very few when few tasks are running and my left hand is little bit more hot than the right ;-)

Nota : sometimes at startup nbfc doexn't get the han over the bios, so I need to start Psensor software and after a little time all is done.

Answer 3

If you cannot get fancontrol to work, make sure your kernel is up to date. I had this issue on my laptop, and it immediately began to work after updating the kernel.

Answer 4

In my experience, if you often experience high CPU temperatures in your notebook, the best approach is to first clean any dust that may have accumulated behind you CPU fan. You wouldn't believe the amounts of dust I found behind the fans of some of my friends' notebooks, who experienced similar problems and whose notebooks I cleaned, to great effect.

Of course, you can try to use tools like fancontrol to control the fan speed. But then what? Do you want to configure your fan to run at maximum velocity all the time? This will be very loud, and if there is a lot of dust behind your fan, it will hardly improve the temperatures anyway. In fact, with the temperatures that you describe, I suspect your fan may already be spinning at its highest velocity most of the time.

Cleaning your fan will require you to disassemble some of your laptop's interior. Depending on the exact model, this can either be very easy or very tough. Personally, what I first do in this situation is that I go to YouTube and try to find a disassembly video of the model I'm interested in, e.g., search for something like HP Elitebook 8560w disassembly. It will give you a very good idea of what you have to do for your particular model without any hassle.

A quick search for your model gave me this video, which appears to be ok:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMqUWDR77TI

Unfortunately, from what I can see, for your particular model, it's a bit of work—you have to take out your keyboard in order to be able to access your fan. If you don't like that video, there were several others—just have a look. Note that these disassembly videos usually show you how to disassemble the entire notebook, but if you're only interested in cleaning the fan, you only have to do a tiny subset of what they do in the video (e.g., you don't have to take out the hard disk). What you definitely should do, though, before you start the disassembly, is to take out the battery.