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I have a weird CPU fan issue - as long as I'm playing a game (Cities: Skylines), the CPU fan keeps spinning at the usual RPM while the CPU temperature starts increasing. As expected, the CPU overheats and the PC shuts down.

The weird part is that as soon as I quit the game, the fan kicks in and goes from ~3000 RPM to 5000+ RPM, trying to cooldown the CPU. I saw it in Open Hardware Monitor, but the change is also audible.

I'm looking for a way to either fix this behavior (BIOS update didn't help) or at least find a way to force the CPU fan to work at max speed.

I spend a couple of hours searching/trying anything I could think of, but besides physically removing fan control pins or finding out how to use RWEverything to circumvent the fan speed, I'm out of ideas.

OS: Windows 8.1

Motherboard: ASRock M3A785GMH/128M

Edit: BIOS settings didn't help - there is only target CPU temp/fan speed option and it doesn't change anything, even if disabled

Edit2: https://i.stack.imgur.com/TfgnQ.jpg Immediately after quitting - CPU temp goes down, fan RPM ramps up

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  • Ever thought of getting a liquid cooling system?
    – xR34P3Rx
    Apr 4, 2015 at 21:47
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    @xR34P3Rx It's not a fix but an expensive workaround. If your fan doesn't work as expected you should fix your fan, not buy liquid cooling system.
    – gronostaj
    Apr 4, 2015 at 21:57
  • Still an option. But you might want to check if you have enough thermal compound
    – xR34P3Rx
    Apr 4, 2015 at 22:01
  • @xR34P3Rx It's a 2009 motherboard, the rest of the hardware isn't much better... an entirely new PC will be cheaper than liquid cooling. I changed the thermal paste few months ago as I was also having overheat problems back then. I thought it's the same problem or I did it wrong, but then I noticed the fan being crazy.
    – digibo
    Apr 4, 2015 at 22:07
  • @digibo when was the last time the fan was replaced? Or how old is it?
    – xR34P3Rx
    Apr 4, 2015 at 22:13

2 Answers 2

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Since you can ramp up fan speed by playing other games, we can rule out fan failure and motherboard's inability to control fan speed.

I can only guess that this specific game is doing something weird with CPU that unintentionally caps fan speed on this MoBo. I can think of few unfortunate combinations of game's behavior and driver/MoBo/BIOS bugs that could cause this issue.

Potential solutions that come to mind:

  • Reset BIOS to defaults. If you don't do this, some BIOS bugs can survive upgrade.

  • Update motherboard drivers, specifically chipset drivers. Update GPU drivers too. (In theory this issue has nothing to do with GPU. In practice it's unbelievable that such bug can exist, so you can't be sure GPU drivers are unrelated.)

  • If nothing else works, report a bug.

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  • The usual procedures (BIOS upgrade/defaults) didn't help, I'll try more things (Windowed mode seemed to help, but then relaunching the game in Windowed mode killed the fan as usual). My guess is it's probably a Drivers/Windows/DirectX/Unity issue, rather than something that Paradox (you?) can do about. I'll make a bug report if I don't find a solution.
    – digibo
    Apr 4, 2015 at 23:20
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  1. Disable passive cooling in windows if you can
  2. Unplug and plug in your fan
  3. Disable any passive cooling options in BIOS
  4. You can try a very low target temperature on BIOS
  5. AMD used to allow CPUs to work in higher temperatures. You can try underclocking your CPU. (Just decrease the multiplier by 1 or 2)

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