Heat and Fan on the SP4

[James Denaro]

Just confirming the reports of others that the cooling fan arbitrarily spins up under *extremely light loads.

The cooling fan is absolutely horrific. When on AC power, the slightest provocation will send the fan to the highest speed. I reformatted, reinstalled with just the basics (Adobe CS, Office) and ran only Chrome. Even at <10% CPU and downclocked to .5GHz, the fan would blast away. While it was wasn’t clear what causes the fan to engage, it seemed that if you got to about 50% CPU for even a brief moment, you would have full speed fan for the next five minutes or so. But if you booted up and didn't actually do anything, the machine was absolutely silent. It was only when you start to use it that the fan would crank. Sometimes, I'd walk by the machine that was previously sleeping to see it awake and the fan whirring away.

Being plugged in to AC power definitely increased the chances of the fan coming on. Returning asap.

 

[ttsoldier]

Since I've gotten my surface pro.. about 48 hours. I have not heard any fan noise. Web Broswsing, store app updates, watching movies, multi tasking. streaming youtube...

What I have not done is update the surface at all....

I'm convinced all problems are related to windows hello/intel drivers for the 6th gen processor and i'm sure they will be resolved later on.

 

[sflxn]

I was just using this on my lap, and the battery drained within 2 hours. It lasted 2 TV shows. I wondered why so I looked at task manager. Microsoft Edge - 48% CPU. Surprisingly, the tablet did not get hot and the fan did not go full blast. It's puzzling. Why does sometimes it gets very hot but other times it doesn't. This experience tells me it's not the CPU usage, which is another hot topic about this tablet!

I'm on the verge of returning this tablet. It will simply not work as a travel tablet in its current form. I'm going to look at the Surface Book, Chromebook, XPS 13 or another MacBook Air. I'll give Microsoft the next 3 weeks before I have to return this to fix these problems. The fact that these problems existed in the SP3 does not give me hope. Performance wise, this tablet is such a pleasure, but my gosh, the bugs and glitches.

 

[badMojo69]

Stop using edge. I did no more fan unless I'm gaming.

 

[PLGomez]

I've been using my SP3 off the charger and that's helped quite a bit. The fan still kicks on every once in a while but not like when I'm plugged in charging it and using it.

 

[GatsbyGlen]

I've been using my SP3 off the charger and that's helped quite a bit. The fan still kicks on every once in a while but not like when I'm plugged in charging it and using it.

Your system cooling policy is probably set to Active while plugged in. Change it to Passive during those times when you really don't want to hear a fan. Best bet is to disable connected standby (registry key), reboot, create a new power scheme and configure, turn connected standby back on, reboot. You'll have a Balanced Profile (your current one) and the new one you created. Toggle back and forth between them when needed.

 

[ttsoldier]

Again, I've been using my sp4 for the past couple days.

I have not heard the fan come on once....

 

[polbit]

I'm not usually on the defending end of conversations like this, but it's time to sound like a broken record...

The first SP4 I got had all the issues and more. It was a nightmare to use, but thank goodness I decided to try another one. I really have no issues with battery, fan, heat, or crashing of any kind. I find it hard to believe that those issues are caused by faulty hardware, but then why would replacing the hardware fix them... Anyway, all I know is that my current SP4 is the device I've always wanted since the original Surface Pro.

 

[ttsoldier]

I begun to wonder if the fan was working at all because I never hear it.
while doing the firmware update, I heard it. Thank God .

 

[sflxn]

I've switched to IE and running ad fender now. Fan still powers on for awhile during charging and it still does heats up. It's hard to tell, but it's not as bad as before. Early test with normal usage seems to indicate battery drain has gone down. Even when task manager says it's using 4-8% CPU, the battery is lasting a bit longer. Won't have any definitive answer for a few more days. I'm going to experiment with disabling Hello Windows this weekend. If I can get the battery to last 6+ hours and fix the battery drain while sleeping problem, I'm going to keep this SP4. The fan while charging is not that big a nuisance for me since I don't tend to use it while it's charging. As long as it doesn't completely flake out while charging like it did before, I'll be fine. Maybe it just needs a week or two of usage to age out the bugs.

 

[ttsoldier]

for the people who are having the fan noise, where was yours purchased ?

I got mire from the Microsoft store online and There is no fan noise. Maybe a faulty batch somewhere

 

[WildKarrde]

In my day's use so far, about 12 hours, the fan has been on for maybe 3-5% of the time I've been using it, and that was while testing out a game.

 

[zkyevolved]

I was so excited to get the surface pro 4! I guess I'll wait... My handy little surface pro 2 just bought itself a few more weeks of life haha. Ironically one of the things I wanted to change the surface pro 2 was because of the Wi-Fi bug. Wi-Fi is so slow! Sometimes I can get 10mb other times I can get 350kb download from my lan server. It's horribly flawed with windows 10. Oh well. It's really the only flaw I've seen so far. I hope they fix these issues asap.... I want my SP4! Haha.

Posted via the Windows Central App for Android

 

[Lawrence Lou]

What's model you have? I got my SP4 256GB i7 from Microsoft online. I had got fan noise from start of SP4 and also sp4 heat up very quickly. I got 42.2 degree this morning.

 

[slysy]

What's model you have? I got my SP4 256GB i7 from Microsoft online. I had got fan noise from start of SP4 and also sp4 heat up very quickly. I got 42.2 degree this morning.

Do you think the i7 model heats up more than the i5 model?

Edit: I found the following quote from MS regarding the i7 SP3. I wonder if the same is true of the i7 SP4:

The i7 version of Surface Pro 3 is a first-of-its-kind tablet delivering i7 processing power in a thin and light package. As such, the increased power calls for the fan to spin more regularly and at higher speeds—and for the unit to run slightly warmer.”

 

[Tuono]

I have the entry level i5 SP4 and the fan has only come on once so far when running a full virus scan.

 

[ad78]

i guess there is some hardware fault. i bought mine at BB and some of the issue i read here is the same as mine. while starting the fan blows.. also, without doing nothing fan is making noise. i removed the chrome still doing the same thing.

do not blame chrome! i went to BB and swapped it and right now mine is perfect!
im using chrome as i type this. 12 tabs! plus kodi is running in the background and i even have youtube on the chrome. i dont hear the fan and im in the office.

 

[PaddiWaddi]

My i7/256/16 model runs mainly noisy. Most of the time I can make out the programs that use the cpu that much, but I feel like it shouldn't be on all that often with my usage. Running JAVA VM almost instantly kicks the fan on rly:

 

[Steveborough]

good to read, returning mine to bestbuy today, my i7 fan turns on and device heats up with 15 -20% cpu usage

 

[onlysublime]

The SP4 situation isn't the same as the SP3 situation. The cooling design is different and the CPU/GPU are different. When the SP3 was being designed, it was anticipated that Broadwell would be on time. It was extremely late and in fact was passed over by many vendors. Some Broadwell CPUs were abandoned entirely when Skylake was on the horizon. Broadwell basically ran into the timeframe of Skylake. Because Broadwell was so late, Microsoft had to keep using Haswell for SP3. But the cooling design of SP3 was not designed to handle Haswell. That's one of the reasons why SP2 was so much thicker with a beefier cooling system because SP2 was designed for Haswell to handle Haswell-level heat (the main reason being that SP3 had a bigger footprint so components could be spread out thinly whereas the SP2 only had a 10.6" screen making the footprint smaller so components had to be stacked which made it thick). This is why i7 with SP3 was kind of a mistake. Under sustained load, the i5 was a far better value as the i7 would throttle.



In terms of i5 and i7 for Skylake and the SP4, the only real differences for the CPU part are the i7 has a 4MB cache whereas the i5 has a 3MB cache. The i7 can scale to higher frequencies for more speed. Once the i5 hits its top frequency, it's done. The i7 has the same frequencies as the i5. But if you need to go above i5 frequencies, the i7 can keep going up to 3.4 GHz whereas the i5 stops at 3 GHz. So the i7 only uses more battery and generates more heat than i5 if it climbs above 3 GHz.

The big difference between i5 and i7 is the graphics. The Surface Pro 4 i5 comes with Intel HD Graphics 520 (GT2) and has 24 Execution Units (EUs) clocked at up to 1050 MHz (depending on the CPU model). Due to its lack of dedicated graphics memory or eDRAM cache, the HD 520 has to access the main memory (2x 64bit DDR3L-1600 / DDR4-2133).

The Surface Pro 4 i7 comes with Intel Iris Graphics 540 (GT3e) which has 64 MB of dedicated eDRAM memory which is far far far faster than system RAM. Furthermore, the so-called GT3e-version features 48 Execution Units (EUs) clocked at up to 1050 MHz (depending on the CPU model). Besides the eDRAM cache, the Iris 540 is able to access the main memory (2x 64bit DDR3L-1600 / DDR4-2133).

So theoretically, the Iris graphics is twice as fast as the graphics in the i5 because it has twice the number of execution units. You don't get true 100% difference between 540 and 520 because the 520 actually has faster texture fill rate (Intel did this to shore up the difference). But shader performance is more important and the 540 has over 2X the shader performance.