Yes of course. I’m sorry to respond so late, I must’ve overlooked the message in my mailbox.
Would a picture guide be good enough? Or should I try to make a video about that?
Id love to share how I did it and help you, any everyone else along the way.
Has it? I’m super curious how that could turn out.
I’m not from Framework, but I think I did something to resolve the issue since I had that issue and now I don’t. I’ve been asked to do a tutorial as to how I did it, which I’ll make and post as soon as I can.
Got that tutorial? What did you do? I’m starting to resent my FW13. I can only run on “power saver mode” or the fan sounds like a jet engine.
Ill make and upload it today, my dude. My bad for letting you wait.
@Jonathan_L_Ibarra did the heatsink fix things?
Chiming in to say my FW13 Core Ultra 5 sounds like a mini vacuum cleaner on anything other than Power Save, even when idle. Fedora 41 KDE.
I’ve got a FW 13 AMD, running Arch Linux with Cinnamon desktop. My fan is usually off because my load is normally near zero. Running firefox with 10 tabs or so, and a few terminals, code editor, file browser, image viewer …
top - 14:02:56 up 3 days, 16:59, 1 user, load average: 0.26, 0.89, 0.85
Tasks: 350 total, 1 running, 349 sleep, 0 d-sleep, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 0.6 us, 1.3 sy, 0.0 ni, 97.9 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.2 si, 0.0 st
MiB Mem : 27866.5 total, 16200.0 free, 4035.5 used, 8318.4 buff/cache
It’s normal for modern “thin” laptops to operate at max speed only in very brief bursts: just for a second or so when you open an application, or navigate in a heavy website, etc. The CPU is capable of a lot more than the heatsink, and it is beneficial when very brief load spikes are processed faster, it makes things more responsive/snappy.
Re-pasting the heatsink, or switching to PTM on the heatsink, will probably help a bit. But if your regular set of daily apps idle above ~ 2% CPU usage, I’d consider that a software issue, and try to fix it. Figure out what apps are to blame, and disable the features that are loading your CPU when nothing’s really happening. There have been cases where some electron-based app has a blinking cursor that spins a cpu core under some condition. (15% load is just above 1 core out of 8!)
(Also, measuring load can be very tricky, as mentioned above. Modern CPUs do not go at one speed. Instruction set mixes vary. With SMT, half the cores are “logical” not “physical”, so in a sense, 50% overall cpu usage is much closer to 100% than to 0%. Modern CPUs have features that thus enable “bursting” performance whenever possible, in a few different ways, which can be very beneficial, but it’s not always possible. It varies greatly depending on the specific workload.)
Don’t think this is a software issue. I ran all my workloads fine without significant fan noise on Linux Mint Cinnamon on a 3 y.o. Dell XPS13 with a similar spec, and then just swapped the drive over to the framework. Same workloads, nearly constant fan noise - not spikes.
A bunch of different people have complained in this thread, probably all with different root causes. Maybe in your particular case you don’t have a constant “15% load” on the cpu/system, and the problem is just really bad heatsink contact/install. But if you do have a constant “15% load” at all times, that is a problem. Driver differences, small OS or app update, I don’t know.
This might be a misunderstanding. I did not suggest that the fans would spike. Rather, it is normal for CPU usage to be very spikey/bursty, in modern systems. We expect modern systems to be responsive, and also have good battery life, and the way they do that is by using most of their power for just a fraction of a second at a time. The rest of the time it should be mostly idle, maybe 2% cpu usage. 15% sustained for multiple minutes is possible but will require a lot of fan. If you want better than that, you a desktop/workstation, or a much thicker laptop, or a thin laptop which really throttles/forces down the performance quite drastically after a few seconds.
Alright, I’m sorry to have made you wait, but I’ve just redone the ‘Mod’ and pictured every step of the way.
So, I had a problem with my Framework 13 with a Core i5 1240p.
Back then, running W11, the fan spun up at very mild work loads like watching YouTube and when charging with the lid closed. I repasted the CPU several times just to discover that the high fan speed and subsequent noise persists. Temps with very loud fan noise were in the mid 60s at worst.
I tried everything in software but to no avail. I couldn’t do anything about it.
I isolated the problem down to the power delivery circuit, which suffered from poor thermal transfer to the CPU Cooler through the thermal pads. It desperately tried to cool down through the PCB and then to the CPU.
Even in Frameworks official documentation of the CPU cooler for the 12th Gen CPUs, the thermal pads aren’t compressed evenly by the ICs.
What I’ve done to solve that problem is, I removed the thin pads entirely and left only the thicker pads, meant to reach down to the ICs. To bridge the air gap, I added some thermal paste in the manner Linus and Alex from LMG would have with thermal putty (K5 Pro) on a poor RTX4090.
To follow my steps, it’d be handy to begin with a clean slate, that means all the thermal paste of the CPU removed, and the thin thermal pads removed from the cooler or power delivery chips.
This is how the clean motherboard is supposed to look like.
That’s just the clean cooler with the thin and arguably useless thermal pads already removed.
Red ones go, blue ones stay.
Now to the thermal paste. It is just as easy as to dab a little onto the chips marked in red, the ones in blue are optional but won’t hurt to also cover. They just weren’t previously covered by a thermal pad, so I saw no need to add some for my laptop. It worked just fine anyway
With every IC covered with a dab of thermal paste, it should look a little something like this:
After remounting the CPU Cooler, you can button up your laptop and enjoy it with now 90% less fan noise.
I really do hope it helps you out. I can’t tell 100% for sure because my current experience is limited to a single unit.
Many thanks Max, I’ll await the results of others before I attempt this. My work owns my Framework, officially.
That sounds like a cool company you work for xD
Wow, thanks for the detailed tutorial! This sounds like it’s really a manufacturing or design issue. I would think framework team members would take an interest in threads like these but apparently they don’t. So I’m going to check in with customer service first to see if this is a known issue, and then I’ll try your fix.
