The Framework laptop is the best laptop I’ve ever had, but it’s getting a lot of bad press about fan noise recently. I’ve only had occasional problems with fan noise when running more demanding apps. However, when I installed Virtualbox under Ubuntu-MATE 22.04.3 and tried to run Windows 10 as a guest OS my laptop fan was so LOUD it was terrible trying to use it. The CPU load was not very high, but some of the cores were reaching 100C and making the fan run at full speed.
I trawled the Internet looking for a solution and soon realised that this is a well trodden path. I discovered lots of people with the same problem and negative comments by reviewers about fan noise. Until now, I’ve been using my Framework 12th gen. laptop for tasks that don’t require much CPU, but I want to use it as a desk-top replacement and the fan noise is a BIG problem.
The majority of work-arounds and fixes that I’ve seen are aimed at stopping the OS (Linux mainly) from ‘boosting’ the CPU. This is not much use for BSD or Windows users and I did some experimenting with the BIOS settings. The base frequecy of the 12th Gen Intel Core i7-1260P in my 12th gen Framework laptop is 2.1GHz, which is fast enough for most of the things I want to do. I don’t really need the turbo ‘boost’ to be enabled by the OS kernel, so I’ve disabled “Intel (R) SpeedStep™” in the BIOS - No other changes.
I now have a quiet Framework 12th Gen laptop that can run two Google Chrome profiles. Mozilla Thunderbird, several terminals and Windows 10 under Virtualbox with core temps around 50C with the fan spinning slowly and almost silently. Before, most of the cores were idle and one or two peaked at 100C when boosted. Now, none of the cores are boosted and performance is quite acceptable in return for the peace and quiet!
As you can see in the second picture, I have a HDMI and two DP monitors connected: I saw reports that these might be the cause of the fan noise, but it was just the same using only the laptop display…
And, @Matt_Hartley, yes I am running the oem kernel you suggested 
Bye,
Tony Travis
