Heat and Fan on the SP4

[coocooman3]

Capacitors sometimes wine when they're charging. However, not an electrical engineer, so don't know if that's worth worrying about. Although the capacitors on these are so freaking tiny don't know if they would make noise. Could always swap it at a Microsoft store or by mail if it stays an issue, once stock is actually back in place. That's 100% factory defect, if it's a defect. But I don't have a good answer. My portable battery for my smartphone wines like that when I'm using the smartphone screen whole charging. Don't know why. But it hasn't exploded on my yet

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[brianbrain]

My SP4 (i5/256GB/16GB) is usually plugged into the Surface Dock and the fan runs waaay too often. Right now, Outlook is eating CPU. Not sure why. Of course, I installed Insider Preview, so kind of my fault.

Surface Dock is probably the reason - take the charging heat away and it will probably be silent more often. Shame the heat plate couldn't have been insulated a bit more from the battery, but it's a pretty tightly packed device already.

 

[NokianWP]

I have the i5 256gb model and I have noticed the fan Come on frequently. It's come on while browsing the web and not so intensive tasks such as writing up notes in OneNote. I sold my MacBook Air and I'm honestly starting to get concerned with my decision. I also have the yellow tint issue on edge and the speakers also started randomly popping when using the pen to write and selecting the predicted words.
Or when hitting the spacebar.

Not sure about the yellowing thing, but the popping should be fixed with an update released yesterday. At any rate, MS will continue optimizations for the SP4, so don't jump before the SP4 is a month old.

 

[runamuck83]

Surface Dock is probably the reason - take the charging heat away and it will probably be silent more often. Shame the heat plate couldn't have been insulated a bit more from the battery, but it's a pretty tightly packed device already.

Yep - I'm getting the same result when I put my Surface Pro 4 in my Surface Pro 3 dock. Once the battery starts charging, the fan comes fully to life. A few people in my office actually heard it and asked me what that noise was.

Within a couple minutes of taking it out of the dock, the fan kicks down and the noise stops.

 

[explosive0]

O God. What have I done? Just picked up my SP4 order from Best Buy and getting rid of my SP 3 with the hope that the annoying overheating and fan noise issues have been resolved. I guess not.

On a different note, while waiting to pickup my SP4 at Best Buy, there was a lady looking at the SP3 and the Best Buy sales person told her to get a MacBook or wait for the iPad Pro instead, that the Surface is "mainly used by people that work in warehouses" WTF

 

[runamuck83]

O God. What have I done? Just picked up my SP4 order from Best Buy and getting rid of my SP 3 with the hope that the annoying overheating and fan noise issues have been resolved. I guess not.

On a different note, while waiting to pickup my SP4 at Best Buy, there was a lady looking at the SP3 and the Best Buy sales person told her to get a MacBook or wait for the iPad Pro instead, that the Surface is "mainly used by people that work in warehouses" WTF

Someone get these idiots out of retail and back to being garbage men where they belong

 

[explosive0]

Someone get these idiots out of retail and back to being garbage men where they belong

I wanted to say something but I didn't want to be rude.

 

[Daylife]

stop using chrome and youll see how much battery youll save lol

 

[PLGomez]

It seems a lot of people, me included, experience the fan and heat while the device is actually plugged in. I usually have it plugged in all the time. That may explain a lot. I'll try using it without it being plugged in for a few days and see if that makes a difference.

 

[explosive0]

stop using chrome and youll see how much battery youll save lol

Haven't used Chrome in ages but still experieced overheating.

 

[Steve WWW]

I have an SP4 256 GB SSD and 8 GB RAM, and noticed the fan coming on after synchronising my OneDrive folder. Task Manager showed some index process running, and a day or two later, the fan hasn't come on since. I think it was just Windows building local search indexes.

Two days ago, I put the SP4 to sleep and left it in a full backpack for a few hours. When I pulled it out, it was very hot. The lesson I learnt from this was the sleep mode does not mean the machine is inactive. It still does stuff in low power mode, and can get quite hot if there's no ventilation.

Now I always power down the SP4 before putting it into my bag. A good way to do this is to configure the power button on top to put the machine in hibernation mode. When it hibernates, I believe the SP4 writes all the memory to SSD and powers down completely. When you hit the power button, it reads all the data from SSD back into memory, and you continue where you left off. The advantage of hibernation mode is that you save battery and can continue where you left off, but at the expense of a few extra seconds when powering on again (literally, it's only like ten seconds, so hibernate mode is well worth it for me).

To configure your SP4 to hibernate when the power button is pressed, go to Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options > Choose what the power buttons do > When I press the power button: set "on battery" and "plugged in" to "Hibernate."

 

[badMojo69]

That's what I do. Screw the people who say dont use Hibernation as they have no idea what they're talking about. Nothing will be instant on like RT. I miss RT.

 

[GatsbyGlen]

So far, installation of Office and the initial synchronization of my Onedrive files is the only time I heard the fan kick on. I can see how that would be annoying to hear all the time :/

As for power options, why don't we see options like minimum processor state, or to define a power mode for the wireless adapter?

 

[onysi]

is the back supposed to be this ******* hot? Lol It's hotter than the surface pro 3. I can't hear the fan but there seems to be air coming out of the vents.

 

[badMojo69]

one has to wonder why companies put out $hit before its ready. if they want beta testers they should do limited releases or market it as such.

 

[ttsoldier]

I mean obviously it has nothing to do with lack of optimization for Intels new processors..... >_<

Would you has preferred the used an older processor in the sp4 to get rid of the "heat and noise" ?

I'm sure a firmware update will fix this later on...

 

[Drayk]

O God. What have I done? Just picked up my SP4 order from Best Buy and getting rid of my SP 3 with the hope that the annoying overheating and fan noise issues have been resolved. I guess not.

On a different note, while waiting to pickup my SP4 at Best Buy, there was a lady looking at the SP3 and the Best Buy sales person told her to get a MacBook or wait for the iPad Pro instead, that the Surface is "mainly used by people that work in warehouses" WTF

I never would have been able to let that one go. I would have definitely jumped into that conversation!!!!

 

[Drayk]

I have an SP4 256 GB SSD and 8 GB RAM, and noticed the fan coming on after synchronising my OneDrive folder. Task Manager showed some index process running, and a day or two later, the fan hasn't come on since. I think it was just Windows building local search indexes.

Two days ago, I put the SP4 to sleep and left it in a full backpack for a few hours. When I pulled it out, it was very hot. The lesson I learnt from this was the sleep mode does not mean the machine is inactive. It still does stuff in low power mode, and can get quite hot if there's no ventilation.

Now I always power down the SP4 before putting it into my bag. A good way to do this is to configure the power button on top to put the machine in hibernation mode. When it hibernates, I believe the SP4 writes all the memory to SSD and powers down completely. When you hit the power button, it reads all the data from SSD back into memory, and you continue where you left off. The advantage of hibernation mode is that you save battery and can continue where you left off, but at the expense of a few extra seconds when powering on again (literally, it's only like ten seconds, so hibernate mode is well worth it for me).

To configure your SP4 to hibernate when the power button is pressed, go to Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options > Choose what the power buttons do > When I press the power button: set "on battery" and "plugged in" to "Hibernate."

Interesting. Nowhere in my Power Options do I have hibernate, or the option to turn on hibernate.
I have a Surface Pro 3 running Win 10

 

[sflxn]

All the Surface defenders who claims "there must be something wrong with your device" are not helping the situation. I've had my SP4 for a week, and I want to keep it so bad, but the battery drain and heat/fan issues have me very worried.

Battery will completely drain if you never use it for a little over a day. Battery will also drain due to a few power management bugs. Here is one instance. I had my SP4 charged up at work but never used it. I unplugged and packed in my bag to walk home. About 1.5hr later, I went to meet a friend to show off the SP4. When I took it out of my bag, the Fan was blowing like a maniac and it was uncomfortably warm. Battery was down to 15%. What apps were I running? Microsoft Edge with 3 tabs and File Explorer. Task manager showed Edge was using 8% CPU. Not a single page with Flash running. BTW, Edge doesn't support plugins so no ad-blocker to save battery and speed up browsing. This scenario has played out several times. I've turned off Windows drive (or whatever it's called), background, network access while asleep, etc. Power management in either Windows 10 or SP4 is about 10 years behind what Apple and Google has. I can close my Mac laptop's lid and come back in 2 weeks, and there's still plenty of charge. No need for hibernate or power off.

SP4 almost always heats up and cause the fan to spin up whenever I plug it in to charge. One morning, I woke up and came out to my living room and was greeted by super loud fan noise. The SP4 was plugged in overnight. The only app running was Lightroom. Task Manager showed 1% CPU. 1% CPU caused this tablet to run full tilt all night?

I am truly hoping these are just firmware, driver bugs. I really like this device. It's so much better than SP3, but the nagging bugs really bothers me. I bought this as a travel and photo editing machine, but if the battery drains while it's in my bag while I'm on the way to the airport, it becomes useless to me. Please note, it doesn't always drain randomly like this. In fact, it does it less frequently than the SP3 (which I returned 3 of them). Performance is so much better than SP3 (which could slow down to worst than a Nexus 7) due to less throttling. Touch is better but still a few years behind iOS and Android. Pen is much more fluid. I really want to keep it, but the power management issues really makes me concern.

 

[sflxn]

It still does stuff in low power mode, and can get quite hot if there's no ventilation.

I'm afraid to report, ventilation has nothing to do with it heating up and the fan spinning up. Usually, I see this occur when the SP4 is sitting on an open table with all the ventilation it can handle. It's definitely a flaw in the OS, drivers, firmware. If a Macbook Air can run cool and quiet forever, the hardware in the SP4 can too. It's the flaky Microsoft software that's the problem. They probably can't figure the root cause because Windows is too bloated.