Is your Dell Latitude laptop hot with the fan continuously running fast and loud for no apparent reason? When you check Task Manager CPU utilization isn’t high as might be expected – no runaway processes that need to be killed, no apps killing the CPU with high demand. Sure you have your base apps open, and the normal 12 28 tabs in your favorite browser (Vivaldi) but you’re not rendering any video files or running a Bitcoin mining operation. What’s going on?
The Issue – Your laptop’s Intel CPU is being instructed to run at maximum speed for no reason. Then the fan kicks on full blast to cool the now glowing hot CPU. Depending on your environment you may not be able to hear the fan until up close, you will be able to feel the heat on the bottom exhaust grille. This happens randomly and for long periods time. A restart will fix the issue but it will come back. If this happens repeatedly and for long periods of time, it is bad for your system.
The Fix – Steps recommended by Dell technical support. Update Chipset Drivers and BIOS to the latest available, disable Turbo Boost and SpeedStep in the BIOS. Download link for Dell Driver & BIOS Updates.
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- Update – Intel Chipset Device Software (25 Mar 2020 or later)
- Update – Intel Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework (19 Feb 2019 or later)
- Update – Intel Management Engine Components installer (08 Jul 2020 or later)
- Reboot
- Update – BIOS 1.10.1 or later (09 Sep 2020 or later)
- Encrypted drives – Suspend BitLocker/Encryption
- Reboot – Let BIOS update finish and then reboot for a full clean start
- BIOS – Press F12 at startup to configure the BIOS
- BIOS – Change Settings
- Performance -> Intel TurboBoost: Uncheck (disable)
- Performance -> Intel SpeedStep: Uncheck (disable)
- Performance -> C-States Control: Check (enable)
Read more about this Intel issue with Dell Latitude 7400 laptops…
- Dell Community – Dell Latitude 7400 – Fan Noise / Design Flaw
- Dell Community – Latitude 7400 – won’t throttle down
- Reddit – New Dell 7400s running hot?
- Reddit – Latitude 7400 and fan noise
- From Dell – Troubleshoot Overheating, Shutdown, or Thermal Issue on a Dell PC
6 thoughts on “Dell Latitude 7400 Running Hot and Loud with Heat & Fan Issue”
Seems to have worked for me. Thanks for this!
So you disabled Speedstep and TurboBoost. You basicly just tell the CPU to run at it’s lowest speed possible, which is below 2.00ghz in a U sku like this. And it won’t “auto-overclock” to 4ghz. So really not a good idea, unless you want a slowass computer.
Speedstep should not increase power to laptop machine in any case, as to prevent heat issues. Laptop fan works all the time it is an irritating issue. Yes, Dell could have done better job with their heat management design, but it is what it is.
Turboboost overclocks the CPU. You need to decide if you are willing to sacrifice noise vs performance, but the CPU at its base core clock should be more than enough for daily work related stuff (unless you are in ML or video or any high intensive work in which case do not use Dell 7400 laptop).
According to the BIOS disabling speed step “Places the processor into the highest performance state and prevents the Intel SpeedStep applet or native OS driver from adjusting the processors performance”. – So it sounds like it puts the processor at its highest performance state which would be counter intuitive to do when wanting to decrease the fan speed.
all solutions seems good however, ultimately replacing Fan, and clearing the air way could be the p et best solutions. additionally update bios, chipset to latest version.
So after 20 years of building laptops, we still need to deal with this nonsense? Why couldn’t Dell build a better system?