Unreliable fan behaviour in Octane VI; Control Centre suspect

[Laivasse]

This is an intermittent issue I'm having with my Octane VI i7-8700k w/ RTX 2080, ordered last summer, which has otherwise been excellent or even better in all respects.

For most of the time I use this laptop, temps are very satisfactory. Idle/net browsing temps for CPU is low 40s and GPU the same or lower. Under load, in the very demanding and poorly optimised Kingdom Come: Deliverance, CPU can peak at 85C under sustained play while GPU peaks at 75C or less. This is with fans set to 5% offset in Control Centre 2.0, so in theory it could perform even better if I wanted to deal with more fan noise. Considering that sales indicated this configuration might frequently hit 100C under load, I've been beyond satisfied.

However, now and again, usually after I haven't used the laptop for gaming in a few days, I'm faced with a situation where the fans don't seem to be handling the temps at all. CPU fan and temp behaviour remains the same under idle and load, but GPU will quickly creep up and beyond 75C on the KCD main menu alone, then be set to go much much higher, probably 90C or more, unless I handle it myself by tabbing out and dragging the fan offset to a much higher value or setting fans to maximum. Either of these measures works to bring temps back under control, but the fan noise difference when the fans finally kick in makes it obvious that they weren't really doing their job at all at the original offset value.

I've been faced with this problem about 3 separate times now and each time I seem to be eventually able to 'jog' the system out of this behaviour by fiddling with offset values or changing back and forth between Automatic vs Custom fan profiles in Control Centre. Once I do this enough times, or perhaps due to some other unseen change I'm unaware of, 5% fan offset will once again become perfectly sufficient for the fans to keep games at around 75C peak. One time I was able to fix it via a full power-down, 2 minute wait and then restarting (simple restart does *not* fix it). I'm unsure what causes the change in behaviour in the first place.

I've updated CCC 2.0 to 1.0.78 via the Clevo website and it hasn't changed this pattern. Changing nVidia drivers makes no difference either. I seem to have a few ways to jiggle the fans back into behaving properly when this problem occurs but none of them are ideal or reliable. For instance increasing the offset to around 40% makes them louder under idle and also doesn't seem to keep them as adaptable at higher temps, so the GPU still peaks a few degrees higher when I'm experiencing this behaviour.

Anyone have an idea what's going on or have a better idea of what the culprit might be? Any perceivable benefit in trying CCC 3.0? Obviously I'm not eager to RMA or re-paste a system that seems to be running very well most of the time, outside what might very well be a software utility problem.

Specs:

Chassis & Display
Octane Series: 17.3" Matte Full HD 144Hz 72% NTSC LED Widescreen (1920x1080) + G-Sync
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™ i7 Six Core Processor i7-8700k (3.7GHz) 12MB Cache
Memory (RAM)
16GB Corsair 2666MHz SODIMM DDR4 (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
NVIDIA® GeForce® RTX 2080 - 8.0GB GDDR6 Video RAM - DirectX® 12.1
1st M.2 SSD Drive
2TB SAMSUNG 970 EVO M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 3500MB/R, 2500MB/W)

&
W10 pro.

 

[SpyderTracks]

That does sound like a possible bug in control center, good catch. I would report that to PCS, worth sending them an email with any evidence you can amass to help them troubleshoot with Clevo directly.

I have had similar things on my Vortex which I bought in 2014 actually, but the fans will remain at full pelt when there's not very much stress on the system and temps are in the 40's. Same thing, if i manually adjust the fans, they'll return to normall operation. I've only had it a couple of times so not done anything about it.

I wouldn't have thought a repaste was applicable in this instance, you're temps don't seem to be the issue.

The fans are definitely coming on ok? It's possible that the GPU fan is slightly faulty and not actually triggering when the temp starts ramping, perhaps a sensor is out of whack or something. You can test this by removing the underside cover and doing some benchmarks.

 

[Laivasse]

Thanks for the feedback, it's good to know my instincts probably aren't totally off. If the problem occurs again I'll be sure to document exactly what I did beforehand and what I did that does or doesn't work. I happen to have just fixed it again via a power-down but I'm still fuzzy on the circumstances besides that.

The fans are definitely coming on ok? It's possible that the GPU fan is slightly faulty and not actually triggering when the temp starts ramping, perhaps a sensor is out of whack or something. You can test this by removing the underside cover and doing some benchmarks.

99% of the time, when this isn't an issue, the fans are certainly coming on okay (audibly and noticeably slowing temp creep). Even when it's an issue, I can force them to behave as normal or close to normal by dragging the offset a significant amount or ramping to Maximum fans. However, under rare mysterious circumstances, the problem does seem to be that a low offset will cause them to not come on at all or to come on far too late. The very first time this occurred, it slipped my attention totally so I was looking at a max temp of 90C-ish in HWM after the fans suddenly started blaring. Then when I 'jog' the system back into behaving, it will consistently manage temps fine at a 5% fan offset value, even for months at a time.

 

[zeeqon]

Hello,

This has happened to me but for the CPU.

I did a fresh Windows install and everything was fine after. Apparently it was a windows update which caused CC to mallfunction.
Edit: I do have the same setup as you, the only difference is I have the i7-9700K and 32gb of ram.
I do recomment to download the winwdows from the microsoft website and burn it to a media, don't use a "old" windows version.


Kind Regards,
Marius