In previous Intel Centrino notebooks you were able to use the program Notebook Hardware Control. After supplying an edited ACPI file you had the opportunity to change the CPU speed, voltage and videocard GPU Clock. This resulted in a more quiet laptop. Over the years Intel SpeedStep technology has become much better.

However it does not take in effect :

• The aging of the laptop and thus drying out of cooling paste. EIST does not notice that.
• After a while more (unwanted) processes are running which turn the fan on
• Fans may be blocked with dust.

Previous steps

Over the past few years I have seen the following things to optimize power/cooling and fan noise

• RMClock (worked partially) as it does not have the ability to adjust the ACPI.
• Notebook Hardware Control with undervolting (beware of too low voltages which make the system instable and thus unreliable. It may freeze.

Todays laptops with Intel Core i3/i5/i7 chipsets need:

• Notebookfancontrol installs it’s on thermal control instead of the Intel ICH6 temperature monitoring and control. No need for an ACPI file, You can manually adjust the fan speed. However please be carefull about monitoring the temperatures. Laptops do not like 80+ degrees.
• Nvidia Inspector has the ability to lower the graphical clock speed. In Optimus laptops however it may be smarter to run only on the integrated HD graphics chip. The change of the clockspeed there is unknown. Nvidia inspector can however, lower the dedicated video chipset speed and memory usage without any visual effects. I hoped that this would reduce heat.
• Intel XTU (Xtreme Tuning Utility) can lower the multiplier and monitor several functions such as temperature, TDP level, current cpu status and more. It does not have the ability to undervolt.
• To adjust the CPU speed and to avoid TurboBoost (which makes the laptop overclock) you can use Throttlestop 8 or later to control this. A different method is set the maximum processor speed in the Energy options to 99% or lower so that TurboBoost is not used.