Hardware Noise Under Linux But Not XP

On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 00:29:44 -0600, Marshall Lake

It's probably the CPU fan. XP has a control panel that allows you to set different performance modes, it's possible that XP is running in a low power mode. It's also possible that you aren't doing anything that's particularly taxing under XP. The first thing to do is to run top or gnome-system-monitor to see how loaded your CPU is. There might be a process that's keeping the CPU busy. If the CPU isn't particularly busy then it could be a fan control issue. Some motherboards have a smart fan control mechanism in their BIOS which will vary the fan speed depending the CPU temperature. It's possible for Linux to interfere with that mechanism. I just got a new system with an MSI K8N Neo2 motherboard. The Neo2 BIOS will allow you to select a CPU temperature below which the CPU fan is off and above which it's on. The modules required by lmsensors interfere with this mechanism. If the i2c-isa and w83627hf modules are loaded the fan runs all of the time. To see if you are loading any modules for lmsensors checketc-sysconfig-lmsensors (at least on Fedora Core systems, I suspect that it's the same for many other distros). To stop those modules from loading just comment them out.