Laptop running hot, fan never comes on: HELP

ponga

I have a machine with a SuperMicro X5DP8-G2 motherboard. Not a laptop! But it has a fan socket on it for overheat protection that will never matter, since I do not use it. The reason I do not use it is it does not turn on the red LED or the fan unless the temperature exceeds 72¡C and Intel say my processors must never exceed 70¡C. This is adjustable in the BIOS (only), but 72¡C is the lowest I can set it.

Am I correct in buttuming your laptop is too hot even when you reboot it? Or does the boot procedure run the fan even when the machine is cold just to see that it works and then goes into some normal mode where it does not think the machine is too hot? What happens if you turn your machine off overnight and then boot it? Does the fan come on right away while it boots? Or must it have been running a while with heavy compute load and you then reboot it to get the fan to come on?

On my non-laptop, the fan has nothing to do with the OS. It runs as part of the MB and BIOS. Or it would if I were willing to wait until it got up to 72¡C.

For monitoring it, how about the sensors and i2cpackages? Together, these can produce output like this (I have it run under cron every 15 minutes:

Sun Feb 12 06:00:00 EST 2006 w83627hf-isa-0290 VCore: +1.44 V (min = +1.36 V, max = +1.47 V) +3.3V: +3.31 V (min = +3.13 V, max = +3.45 V) +5V: +4.94 V (min = +4.84 V, max = +5.24 V) +12V: +11.89 V (min = +11.48 V, max = +12.58 V) -12V: -11.88 V (min = -13.06 V, max = -11.41 V) V5SB: +5.39 V (min = +4.84 V, max = +5.24 V) VBat: +3.23 V (min = +2.40 V, max = +3.60 V) CPU0 fan: 2812 RPM (min = 375 RPM, div = 8) CPU1 fan: 2058 RPM (min = 375 RPM, div = 8) System: +38¡C CPU0: +54.5¡C CPU1: +53.5¡C vid: +1.400 V

-- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. V PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. ^^-^^ 05:55:00 up 22 days, 21:23, 5 users, load average: 4.26, 4.18, 4.13