fan is loud when folding

[mistermateo]

Hello

I installed the folding app a few days ago but i have a little but very uncomfortable issue : when my computer is folding the fan goes on and it makes some noise. Since I use my personal laptop that is uncomfortable, especially at night.

I have a laptop with a cpu and gpu. Because the cpu is folding wayyyy slower than the gpu i removed it from the list so it won't be used to fold and not overheat for a negligible amount of calculation. Then I tried to change the "folding power". If it is on low the gpu just stop, and if it is on medium or high the gpu works but the fans go on :/

Is there a way to make my gpu work at only a certain percentage of its capabilities to avoid it to overheat and trigger the fans ? I saw it was possible for cpu but didn't find any thing for gpu.

Thanks !

[bruce]

Welcome to foldingforum.org, mistermateo.

Laptops are intentionally designed to be low-performance with the goal of extending the time they can operate on battery. Nevertheless, they have to avoid overheating when you give them a serious computing task that lasts more than a few seconds. This pretty much precludes a design containing a GPU that can fold -- although there are a limited number laptop GPUs that have enough performance to complete GPU WUs within their deadlines -- but I certainly don't expect that many can use them in that way.

When plugged in to the mains, the battery becomes less of an issue but doing heavy work like FAH ALWAYS produces a significant amount of heat. A well-designed should have a fan that can dissipate this heat before it reaches the point of damaging the hardware. Cooling trays can be purchased to allow more heat to dissipate out the bottom. Simply placing the laptop on bottle caps or something similar to raise it off the table may be sufficient.

Another alternative that's often used is to reduce the amount of FAH work that you attempt. Removing the GPU slot entirely would allow FAH to use both of the CPUs, increasing the performance of the CPU slot, but you'll have to see if that still produces enough heat to turn on the fan.

[rwh202]

Another option is to under-clock the GPU or, if a recent nvidia, call nvidia-smi -pl with a suitable reduced power limit. That will reduce power, heat and noise, but also reduce GPU performance and for most laptops might make a marginal GPU too slow to make meaningful contributions.

[foldy]

On Windows there are tools e.g. MSI Afterburner where you can set a power limit to 50%.
Then your GPU slows down and produces only half the heat => half the noise.

[bruce]

...and produces only half the heat => half the noise.

Maybe even less. At some point there's enough heat dissipateing through the bottom/keboard/vents/etc. that the fan isn't needed. That may not be much, though, and there's no way to predict at what point it can happen. The choices are
> 1 GPU + 2 CPUs
> 1 GPU + 1 CPU
> GPU only
> GPU only at 50% or whatever
> Two CPUs (zero GPUs)
> One CPU only

The slider doesn't give you all of those choices.

[mistermateo]

thanks for all the ideas.

I tried to under-clock but it is not enough to stop the fan. I also tried to set a max power consumption with afterburner but it is not possible with my gpu, looks like the manufacturer has blocked this parameter. So I am now folding with just one core of my cpu. It still triggers the fan but at low speed.

[maiklohse]

I have an iMac Pro. So a pretty powerful machine. And about 2ß seconds after it started folding the fans went up to full speed very loudly and didn't stop. This makes me feel like I might be damaging my machine over the longs haul

[Joe_H]

You can configure the folding client to use less resources, and therefore produce less heat. Basically this will happen for any application that uses your system to its capacity, whether that is folding, video rendering, or something else.

That said, Apple's engineers are pretty good about designing cooling systems and keeping the components from being damaged. I have been running folding on my 2009 27" iMac since I purchased it in 2010, the only failure has been the video card and that was a known weak item that failed for many in normal use.

[Neil-B]

One other thing to remember - and can sometimes make a big difference - is that the ducts which the air flows through can in the normal course of use get a lot of dust/dirt/hair (especially laptops) and if the air paths are restricted the fans have to work much harder to get air through the cooling system - clearing the air paths can make a surprising difference (especially laptops again).

[Darth_Peter_dualxeon]

I think, blow the dust out of the laptop, and put it on something (like, four bottle caps or a laptop cooler), not directly on the table, so you can have airflow.
(if you are brave enough, and the laptop isn't new, maybe redo the cooling pasta on the CPU/GPU, hopefully there are youtube videos to do so, for almost every laptop)

but yes, folding may be too much for laptops. My gamer laptop overheated and I had to reduce cpu count to 2, and then it was "only" 75-80 C. Then I installed the folding program on the workstation (which wasn't used anyway as I'm only doing office stuff nowadays)

[maiklohse]

I set the power from "Medium" to "Light" and now the fans are quiet. Just seemed really weird to me because usually no matter what task I throw at the iMac Pro - the fans have NEVER gotten that loud on a constant basis. But this way I can take it - even on "Light" I am still doing my part

[Joe_H]

Moving from Medium to Light changes the CPU thread usage from all but one, to half the ones available. You can make that a permanent setting through FAHControl if you want. Click on Configure, select the Slots tab and click on the CPU entry. Then Edit from the bottom right, change the '-1' in the CPU threads setting to the number you want to use. That can be 1 to the maximum number supported by your processor. Then OK the change and Save.

[bruce]

Most of the heat probably comes from your GPU with the number of CPU threads another primary source. You can adjust both in FAHControl.

It would be interesting to set a laptop to a specific number of CPU threads plus a GPU that's on "idle" I'd think the added heat from he GPU would be audible when the OS decided the machine is idle.

Is anybody folding with a eGPU yet?

[PantherX]

...Is anybody folding with a eGPU yet?

There was a donor that was able to fold on eGPU when they booted into Linux since GPU folding isn't supported on macOS. I will see if I can find the topic.

EDIT: The eGPU was recognized in Ubuntu but the Donor couldn't make it past the driver issue. The client did detect the eGPU which is a good start: viewtopic.php?p=324692#p324692