Loud fan | excessive CPU throttling | laptop running hot? Clean the fan!

Framework Laptop 13
1

My 12th Gen was running slowly, and exhibiting weird CPU throttling and/or excessive fan noise.
I have seen a mix bag of the following:

  • CPU throttled at 400MHz while running heavy loads (like compiling code, or even running s-tui in stress mode)
  • CPU frequency alternating between full speed and 400MHz when under a bit of load
  • fan running at full speed for hours despite the room being fairly cool, and CPU load staying well under 20% for prolonged periods of time

After spending multiple weeks reading this forum and bugging tech support for help, I decided to give my CPU a repaste.
While I was at it, I decided to give the fan assembly a deep clean.

I followed Heatsink and Fan Replacement Guide - Framework Guides and cleaned the fan as best I could by blowing on it and rubbing it with an alcohol soaked cloth (the one that came with the thermal paste kit) to remove the dirt stuck on it.

What I have seen nowhere in the docs is the following:

  • once the fan assembly is disconnected, flip it over, and remove the 3 tiny screws circled in red below
  • carefully remove the tape marked in green
  • pay attention to the clip marked in blue when you lift the fan itself from the heatsink

I found about 1cm3 of lint in there, like the stuff found in laundry dryers! I removed that, and cleaned the heatsink with the same cloth. Blew through the fan outlet like in a harmonica.
Basically, the fan couldn’t really cool things down as half of its exhaust was blocked.

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After repasting and reassembling everything, all the annoying symptoms above are gone.

My machine is ~1.5 year old, and I’d tried to clean the fan before, but not to this extent.

@Loell_Framework Since we have exchanged a few emails around this topic but cleaning the fan never came up in support’s suggestions, can I suggest you update relevant docs?
I would also suggest a laptop cleaning guide that includes these steps :slight_smile:

Hope this helps someone!

5 Likes
2

Great info right here. I was wondering how and if you could get into the fan apparatus to give it a truly thorough clean. Thankfully you showed me how it can be done!

3

Nice little guide. Just completed similar maintenance on my 11th gen.

But, what are those strange cross-shaped screws? Joking, joking. I’m just not used to seeing the ubiquitous PH screw in Framework products!

With them being a relatively common failure point in otherwise healthy systems, my personal preference would be for the fan to be removeable/replaceable/upgradeable by itself. Though I understand why the tradeoff was made to keep the whole thing as a unit. I wonder what bearings are used, and what kind of MTBFs they have.

4

That is probably because the fans come completely assembled from some other OEM. Framework would buy them in as a completely assembled item, not assemble them themselves.