Is it normal for the Surface Book to have fan noise for menial tasks?

[Windows Central Question]

I recently received my Surface Book i7/16 and the fan noise is really obnoxious. It's incredibly noticeable when streaming videos from YouTube, Twitch, etc. in a browser... any browser. I tried Edge, Firefox, Chrome... no matter which browser, CPU usage is around 50-75% when the video is fullscreen, and the fans kick on after a minute or two, requiring me to turn the volume up significantly. Is this just me or is this totally normal? I have a hard time believing a streaming video is going to take up that much CPU on an i7 and require the fans to kick on full gear so easily. It really makes me question this purchase if it's going to be this noisy on even the most basic of tasks, especially at this price point.

 

[olyar15]

Definitely abnormal. My SB is silent except when gaming or other CPU-intensive work.

 

[madas]

Mine has been doing this also.

I have a slideshow screensaver setup and the fan kicks in within about 1 minute of the slideshow starting and remains on for the entire slideshow. My old SP3 never did this.

I am running all of the latest updates

 

[zerospace-net]

Definitely abnormal. My SB is silent except when gaming or other CPU-intensive work.

This is my experience as well -- fan noise only when doing intensive tasks & gaming.

 

[gtbuzz]

Add one more vote for the "abnormal" choice. I upgrade to the i7/16 SB from an i7 SP3. It's like night and day for me. The SP3 fan ran almost constantly, whereas the SB fan seems to rarely run. Even if it does, it's rather quiet unless doing some real heavy lifting. Even then though, still much quieter than SP3

 

[madas]

I wonder if its related to Windows Hello? are you guys using that? (the facial recognition) as I have it enabled.

Right after I kill the slideshow I see some sensor processes using up 20-30% CPU

 

[EnemiesInTheEnd]

I've only heard the fan once and that was during the initial system updates. I haven't heard the fan since.

 

[zerospace-net]

I wonder if its related to Windows Hello? are you guys using that? (the facial recognition) as I have it enabled.

Right after I kill the slideshow I see some sensor processes using up 20-30% CPU

I use Windows Hello and I don't have any excessive fan noise or CPU usage (honestly, the fan hardly even kicks on, if at all, when I'm running Adobe Photoshop on the dGPU). Slideshow is somewhat GPU intensive, and I do hear fan noise when playing even simple games on the SB (like Minesweeper or sometimes even Solitaire) -- these things run by default on the Intel HD graphics and not the dGPU.

 

[Razor237xp]

Mine sits on fresh boot with lid closed after 10 min or so the fan will kick on and will stay on and the whole surface gets warm . there are some host process that eat up 10-30% cpu quite odd and bothersome

Posted via the Windows Central App for Android

 

[Maksym Ovchynnikov]

Sometimes when using utorrent I notice that the fan becomes to work relatively loud, although the CPU/RAM usage is low. Only a network is used very intensed (>30 Mbps). Does anyone face with this problem? Is the loud fan working normal for this situation?

 

[orlbuckeye]

I don't have any problem with fan and my Surface Book.