I've never once had the fan throttle down once it's up to tornado speed. i can leave it sitting in a cold space (ambient air ~50F) and it never stops. I wish Toshiba would announce if they will or will not release something to fix it.
Does anybody know what the Cooling Method slider
Does anybody know what the Cooling Method slider does in the Toshiba Power Saver utility?
I was running CPU and memory benchmarks with SiSoftware's Sandra and found that the slider controls CPU and memory performance with no change in fan speed. With the slider in any position CPU-Z does not change. It shows my processor at 2.0 GHZ and a FSB speed of 166 MHZ all the time and I did re-launch the program when I changed the slider. At first I thought that Speedstep was to blame but then I ran the same tests with Sandra RAM benchmark and it shows a significant drop in performance as well. Also, CPU-Z showed the multiplier at 12x for all tests. I thought that Speedstep only changed the CPU multiplier and should not mess with the FSB. I have uploaded my benchmark results and shots of CPU-Z and Power Saver Utility.
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I only changed the cooling method slider for this test. Throughout this test I was checking the fan speed and no matter what slider setting was used the fan did not slowdown. I then left the laptop sitting idle for one hour with the slider set to Battery Optimized and the fan still did not slow down. CPU temperature did not go higher the 44C or lower then 39C.
I've never once had the fan throttle down once it's up to tornado speed. i can leave it sitting in a cold space (ambient air ~50F) and it never stops. I wish Toshiba would announce if they will or will not release something to fix it.
This is not good news. I guess after getting burned with the craptastic 3500/3505, I've put my "early adopting" on hold. So, yes, I'm being selfish, but it's time I stood back and waited for others to "take one for the team."
The fan loudness and the display problems have me waiting even longer.
But to all of you early adopters with problems, I salute you for sharing in your experience and working for solutions! Thank you all.
-Ed
This is why I'm sticking with my great M200. When I work my fan is hardly ever on. There is no fan, no noise...
Dear Toshiba, after super M200 I hoped you can come up with something better than the M400...
Just got off the phone with Toshiba technical support. I inquired about the CPU fan not throttling down and was told it is a "feature" of the M400. Also, there is no planed BIOS update to fix the "feature". As a side note, the fan when the laptop is in battery optimized mode can barely be heard over the sound of an A.C. vent. But, when at Max Performance the fan can be very annoying and will only slow down if the laptop is restarted or turned off for a few minutes depending on room temperature.
We have found this same thing on the M4 - I tested with a 600 page PDF - digital book. When the "cooling" was to max performance the PDF would FLY thru the pages with no problem... When the slider was at the other extreme - the PDF would jump from page to page, almost with a slight pause at each page. No, I don't know what all of this means... but it definately does something to the performance. When I did my last clean install - I didn't load it back on my M4.
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