interesting. Lots of flaws, lots of gripes, possibly out-of-box quality control issues… which have me worried about the system I have bought but not yet picked up from BestBuy. But apparently it’s on the whole too good to not stick with.
I will keep the group posted once I start using mine.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ZephyrusG14/comments/x0jmc8/bios_313_a_survivors_guide/ is the tale of woe for those who get a Horribly Buggy BIOS that went out some months ago.
If you do happen to experience problem (not a given by any means), I’m sure the community of Asus ROG gamers will be more active in finding solutions than the community of Lenovo Ideapad (my new AMD laptop) users.
As I’ve detailed before, the only problems with my machine are the fans kicking in at 40 degrees C and possibly slow random access read/write performance for my Micron SSD. And maybe there are some issues with Windows 11 that is causing slow printer access and random error alerts when printing despite the fact that the prints still seem to complete just fine.
As I’ve detailed before, the only problems with my machine are the fans kicking in at 40 degrees C and possibly slow random access read/write performance for my Micron SSD.
FWIW they might even be connected; many SSDs slow down at high temperatures.
Here’s a suggestion, buy a laptop cooler bay and power it from a seperate USB plug (to avoid reducing the power for the laptop’s CPU/GPU). You just pop your laptop on top of it and you can see 10C reductions. Pick one with big slow quiet fans, problem may be solved. Even without fans, having air gaps under the laptop helps a lot with cooling.
e.g.
I suppose that MIGHT be worth a shot, but I presume whatever fans the cooling pad has will be running ALL THE TIME, and even if fairly quiet would still be noticeable in an otherwise silent room. I like quite! But perhaps fans running all the time would still be better than fans that rev up and turn off sporadically. Just to give an idea how ridiculous the current situation is, even when merely scrolling my browser looking at the Amazon reviews of one of those cooling pads, the fans kicked in at a mere 38 degrees C and didn’t turn off until it went down to 34. The CPU load was as close to 0 as you can get, and the power draw was only about 7 watts.
At this point, I’m regretting I didn’t make getting a fanless laptop my first priority. They DO exist, even for non-Apple laptops!
I stopped commenting on this issue because I could probably fix it if I had the laptop in my hands, but the right/correct solution is to get Lenovo to sort it out. As a guess, the issue is the order in which drivers are loaded. The dumb fan controller (from Lenovo?) is probably installing over a decent fan control application (from AMD?) that installed earlier. You should have a (long) log file that can be used to sort it out.
Actually, what I would probably do is give it to my son, who does this sort of thing full-time for his employer. 
I don’t know how many fanless laptops there are at this point. Tablets of course are a different matter-- I have an HP chromebook tablet that suits me well for daily work away from home and media consumption that’s fanless. But for a normal laptop your best bet may be to underclock and/or create a power plan that locks the speed down low.
I’d underclock it or undervolt it or impose a custom fan curve if any of those were possible, but so far, none of those methods have been. I suppose I do have to call Lenovo, but I’m not expecting much help there. Plenty of others have been griping about the borked BIOSes on Ideapads for a few years with no solutions other than various cryptic incantations to unlock the advanced features in the BIOS. But I doubt Lenovo support is going to divulge that to me if I ask for it. As for Eachus’ hunch about conflicting fan drivers/controllers, I’ve seen nothing about that googling either, but I suppose it could still be the ultimate cause of the problem.
So, I finally decided to submit an official support request to Lenovo about the fan noise on my new Ideapad, and - incredibly - they want me to send it in to a “Lenovo Depot Repair Service” center. And this “solution” was decided on after only reading my issue description. They didn’t even want to get more information from me or try to resolve it some other way.
Sorry, but I’m just not going to send the laptop in. This problem should be fixable over the phone and I don’t want to risk them making a mess of my machine.
I dunno… It may be there is a “backup” set of temp sensors and fan control logic that has been known to fail… and they know they need to replace it. It does seem pretty clear that your fan is not triggering off of the temperature sensors that you are reading out.
Alan
Maybe, but it’s not like the fans are completely bonkers: they just rev up too soon. Seems more like a ‘simple’ BIOS fix to me. What other temp sensors are there than the ones built into all the components: CPU, iGPU, eGPU, and SSD:
This info is coming from the seemingly comprehensive HWiNFO64 app, though why it’s not registering any eGPU temps is disturbing. GPU-Z does show that however:
There is probably one on the battery… and if they suspect the battery is overheating it would explain why they are looking for a return for repair. There is likely another one on the motherboard somewhere that is not being read out either.
Alan
Ok. None of the monitoring utilities I had used had any info on the battery temp, and when I just now tried “BatteryMon” from PassMark Hardware - BatteryMon Technical Specifications, it shows the battery temp as “N/A”. No mother board temp info am I finding either so far. The possible issue with failing or malfunctioning temp sensors is plausible I guess, but seems unlikely. I really need some Lenovo support expert to explain in detail what they suspect the problem might be before I’m going to go through the massive inconvenience of returning the laptop and waiting on a possible 3 week repair.
That makes sense. Perhaps some day you will get a down the wire update that fixes it. With my Dell, sometimes I get special updates through a dell utility in addition to the standard windows updates.
Alan
Update: I kind of hate it but I probably won’t stop using it anyway.
Issue #1: the ports are on the sides, including power and video, which makes for a messy desk.
Issue #2: The power isn’t USB-C, it’s some proprietary old fashioned thing. So it won’t work with my unified USB-C connector to my monitor that normally pulls everything – power, video etc… I use this with my mac and my chromebook, makes for relatively elegant desktop. And the power brick is HUGE.
Issue #3: I don’t much like the keyboard feel. I suppose I will get used to it.
But one thing at a time.
My Lenovo Ideapad 5 Pro also has a proprietary power connection port, with a 3x5x1 inch power brick, but it also has a power pass-through USB-C port that can be used instead to charge the laptop, and this port can also be used like a regular USB-C port to transfer data to/from and to charge attached devices. …Waiting for your report of CPU temperature and fan behavior with bated breath. 
Given that this Ideapad fan problem has been griped about on various forums for several years, I don’t hold out much hope for a solution from Lenovo. Surely others with the problem MUST have reported/complained to Lenovo before me…right? I CAN’T be the first! Another thing that has me questioning the utility of sending in the laptop to be “repaired” is that the email stating I had to do that came a mere 15 minutes after I had opened the ticket, and since it was early Sunday morning, on 1/1/2023, I can’t believe any human had actually read what I wrote, let alone researched a solution. Even more so since I quickly added a comment to the ticket requesting more information about what they think the problem could be, and was informed that it could take 2 days before I’d get a response!
So, I’m thinking that some automatic ticket scanning algorithm with a rule such as “any mention of a fan problem requires return of the machine for repair”.
To test that, I’m going to open a separate ticket asking solely for a way to access the advanced BIOS settings (currently hidden), with no mention of fans to see what happens.
PS - I was disallowed from posting this in a separate comment since “only three consecutive replies are allowed with no intervening comment by someone else”. So, I’m adding to my prior post:
Well, so much for the Lenovo support ticket I opened. Got a call back from them today by someone who was next to worthless. She says they have no software fix for this yet still couldn’t tell me what sending in the Laptop would accomplish. No advanced BIOS settings available either she said. Idiotic. The final idiocy is that in the record of the ticket online, there is no sign of the original description I wrote. Utterly worthless. I told here I was extremely dissatisfied and would never buy another Lenovo product again. What a joke.
BTW, what IS the typical/expected CPU temp supposed to be for a Ryzen chip under 0% load, 2.6 w power draw, and a 3.0 GHz clock speed? Those are the numbers I currently see reported by CoreTemp 1.18, along with a CPU temp of 34 degrees C.
Also, I was wondering what the effect on CPU temp and fans would be if, say, this laptop had no thermal paste joining the CPU to the heatsink? Would it be running much hotter?
If you want to manage driver load order in Windows try this:
SysInternals was a utility-making company that Microsoft acquired a long time ago, if I remember rightly – definitely part of MS now.
Their entire suite of tools is shipped as a single download here:
The Windows Sysinternals troubleshooting Utilities have been rolled up into a single suite of tools.
That might work. The reason I said that I would want hands-on to fix the problem is that I would start out with hijackthis! save the machine state, then do what looks appropriate. What would look appropriate? I dunno. Maybe if you ran hijackthis! and sent me a copy of the output I could tell you. The problem with hijackthis! is it allows you to “fix” things that aren’t broken. I often take out a couple dozen duplicates and some Microsoft software I’d rather not have. This 21 Best Free Driver Updater for Windows 10, 11 in 2023 [Updated] gives you a list of driver update programs. I’m not going to recommend anyone in particular. Just note that for a list of free driver updaters, there are an awful lot of programs that will ask for money after you run them.
Huh. I am very familiar with two of the Sysinternals tools: “Process Explorer” and “Psexec”. I used both extensively every day at my old job! I’ll have to check out LoadOrder. Thanks. Of course, I’m not sure what I’ll feel comfortable doing with the results: dare I try to change the load order? And if so, how?
