How to control fan noise in Ubuntu 12.04?

Question

After upgrading from 10.04 to 12.04 I could find that my fan noise is heavier than before. Even though my my CPU usage is less than 10%. can anybody tell me how to control the noise Thanks.

Solution

It's hard to give a solution without knowing the details of your hardware. The main offender in my experience has been the dual graphics card that is found on many laptops these days. Ubuntu's default graphics drivers sometimes use the discrete GPU by default, or uses the graphics card inefficiently, resulting in more heat which causes the fan to run more often and louder.

To solve this, I have installed the recommended proprietary drivers (System Settings > Additional Drivers) and adjusted my settings to use the integrated GPU rather than the discrete GPU (by executing sudo aticonfig --px-igpu; sudo restart lightdm though your system is likely different).

Comments

[kalaracey]

Knowing your hardware might be useful, as I believe it determines at least partially how the fans are utilized.

[Rmano]

We need really to know more of you hardware. For what we know, it could be a piece of paper in the ventilation slit... (Really happened).

[guntbert]

Recommending such a setting without any knowledge about the system in question? You could at least have instructed him how to try it for once on the grub command line.

[Eliah Kagan]

What problem did you have, exactly? You've posted this exact same answer on many different questions that describe different problems.

[Rmano]

Hybrid graphic cards don't have to be ATI only. Nvidia version are around too. So the OP needs to give more info.

[shvahabi]

I've heard and read about "pcie_aspm=force" boot option to be harmful to battery.