Supports system with no dedicated GPU / Single GPU with one GPU fan / Single GPU with dual fan and SLI Systems.Monitor Temperatures and Load, setup up to 4 user profiles and control up to 3 fans. Fan Control is here to allow you to customize your fans to your preference. Set the ramping behavior of each profile for a faster or slower ramping. Set up secure values to trigger maximum fan speed to avoid overheating.
- The modes overclock and automatic seem to apply a fan curve that is defined in the embedded controller (EC), which is exactly the way I would it like to be. The difference between overclock and automatic is mainly a slower hysteresis (high pass filter) in the control logic, so it does not spin up fast at load spikes. In addition, the fan settings of the automatic mode at a given temperature are somewhat lower than in overclock mode, in particular at low temperatures. At high temperatures, both get very loud.
Clevo Fan Control Software
Anyway, this 50 deg GPU makes the fan always spin fast (at around 3k RPM), so the system is constantly loud. (For reading the fan RPMs: the hwinfo64 tool can read it for some clevo models ( -Solved-Monitor-CPU-and-GPU-fan-RPM-on-Clevo-laptops?page=9).
So the fans are controlled via the EC, there seems no direct control of the fans the software. One has to speak with the EC. The common tools (msi afterburner, fanspeed, hwinfo, etc.) fail for this clevo Model. If I get it right, the PREMA BIOS contains also an updated EC firmware with an improved (slower at low temp?) fan curve, but that is not available yet, and anyway I will have to wait for a public version without a premium partner. So I am wondering what to do now. I couldn't find much info on the actual firmware content, or how to modify the fan curves. Ideal would be the possibility to set the fan curve via software, but I don't know if this is possible at all.
Most of the hardware runs out of the box. The special keys on the keyboard are a bit of a problem, but there is a linux-laptop company called tuxedo computers which offer linux-based clevo laptops and they have implemented a kernel module for it, which is easy to compile (can be found in their forum: www.linux-onlineshop.de - it is called tuxedo-wmi).
What annoys me a bit is that I can query very little hardware info. lm-sensors only detects the simple intel coretemp driver for CPU temperatures, and it gets the temperature of the wifi module. I would love any advise on how to query e.g. the CPU voltage, but it seems there is no linux kernel module yet for the monitoring chip used in the clevo system (at least there is one unsupported SuperIO chip).
- What concerns the fan-speed: I have implemented an automatic fan control as a simple linux service, that fetches GPU temperatures from nvidia-smi (the EC is not reliably reporting GPU fan RPMs and GPU temperature for me.)
Fan control application is implemented as simple user-space process. A kernel module might be better, but would be more effort and I am too lazy. I assign the FIFO scheduler to the application, so in theory it should not be interrupted, and there is a background-process that restarts it if it crashed + a check that nvidia-smi actually delivers new temperature data. In case of failure, a high fan speed is assigned as safety measure.
If you could create a utility to adjust fans and the keyboard backlight feature while we did not have Hotkey software installed, you'd be doing all current-gen clevo notebook owners a ridiculous favour.
first, and most importantly, I think the fan control belongs in the EC. A software solution is only a plan B. It has a couple of caveats: when the management thread crashes, the fans do no longer adjust to the temperature. When you reboot the laptop and do not reset the fan speed or start a new management process, the fans stay at the last state, even when the system overheats. This is nothing that can be solved in software. Also, my utility is not 100% working in setting the fan speed. I have added some heuristics to set it to 100% in case anything goes wrong, but that is not really safe.
Further, I found out some of the ports by trial and error. Other clevo laptops might have other ports. In particular for the keyboard backlight I have no clue. So the problem is not the programming, but the maintenance and collecting all the data for various models. I am afraid I won't have the time for that, and I also do not see a good way to do that, because I have only a single laptop and I will not ask other people to experiment writing to various IO ports.
The profile that is labeled as Automatic by Clevo in their Hotkey will most likely do the same things you mention. Not installing it at all and cleaning the CCC from Clevo will result in the fan speed to always be set to auto. Sadly, this means that you got to track the temperatures yourself and I have seen the temperatures go as high as 100C with the auto fan, 4.0 GHz and Clevo stock BIOS. Creating a software based solution that would stay alive as long as the application stays alive would be a blessing for many P775 users if they are running stock Clevo BIOS! In windows there are a few ways of forcing such a software to keep running. Oh yes, in windows, you cannot kill the CCC after it started running. IF you kill the CCC or rather its XTU sub thread, it will instantly shut down the laptop.
Also, despite what it says in the Readme, it does seem to hand over control again on exit rather than setting fans to 100% as stated there. It doesn't revert back to the last used setting in ControlCenter, but I think it's instead going back to "Automatic" in that, or some similar underlying system default. You need to toggle the settings back and forth again in ControlCenter to be sure it is back how you would like things there. I might even consider using ClevoFanControl as the default controller.
I would have said it was mostly likely just false positives, though the comment about something trying to change UAC policy settings is a little worrying. It also advises to uninstall Clevo Control Center first which I'd rather keep. Anyway, there apparently was an old thread for it on NBR at : -custom-clevo-fan-control.818858/So I don't know if anyone can locate that in the backup at nbrchive.net. And apparently this is the original source for it: 2ff7e9595c
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