I recently was given a Chatreey mini pc, based on a AMD Ryzen 335OH chip. I’ve installed dietpi and all working fine.
Thought intermittently, the fan kicks in very fast and makes an annoying noise even when pc is idle, and after a few seconds becomes quieter again. I believe it’s trying to maintain a steady temp. (The CPU runs at 57 Celsius when idle).
The BIOS unfortunately has no controls for TDP, CPU freq etc. I also noticed when in BIOS, the fan is running fast constantly, and then when booting into dietpi it quietens down (though still with intermittent noise problem when idle as mentioned).
I looked at the config CPU Governor and CPU Freq limits. The min CPU freq for 335OH is supposed to be 1400Mhz, which is it. And I don’t know if I can set it lower. I’m a newbie when it comes to this, and not sure what else I can do with config?
I also installed lm-sensors, and it indicates there’s no fan sensor available.
Apart from trying to physically mod the device, is there anything else I can try software-wise to prevent the intermittent noise the fan is making?
or see if there is a BIOS update for added fan control
It seems that fan speed might be hard coded in BIOS and is off till it hits a certain temp then just “turns on” full until it cools…then when it get’s below that it drops out… https://www.chatreey.com/support/general-questions/fan-noise/
I did some further investigating and used temp monitor software (s-tui) and when the TCTL (thermal control) reading reaches 40.5 Celsius or above, the fan immediately starts, making a loud whoosing noise; then after a few seconds it runs ok, and lowers speed, until temp reaches that target value and fan speeds up again, and so on.
The problem is, 40.5 degrees is quite low and the device can reach this target when in a fairly idle state.
It seems the BIOS has hard-coded this fan behaviour. It’s a poor design as the fan shouldn’t be so aggressively speeding at 40.5 degrees!
I’ve checked using lm-sensors and there doesn’t seem a method of using OS software control for the fan, as none are made available from the motherboard.
Unless some one know otherwise, it seems I’d need to try to mod the box e.g lower fan speed with a small device or increase ventilation somehow.