Sudden insane fan usage while idle

[krisfa155002ce]

I have a brand new MSI Vector laptop. Almost from the start I've noticed that the fan is very active, even when not using the computer or it being idle. When using heavy software like games the fan obviously runs faster, but not crazy. I have shrugged it off as Ive read that it is normal for MSI latops to be a bit loud and have fans going somewhat actively even when idle.

However Ive noticed sometimes, completely out of the blue (both while being idle or running a game) that the fan goes completely crazy and super (I mean SUPER) loud to the point where I jump in my chair because it happens so sudden. At that point the fan reached a speed of whopping 7500 RPM, but after I restarted the laptop I see the fan is still going a bit crazy while writing this (not as bad though) (no other applications running) reaching an average 3000-3500 RP sometimes randomly going up to 4000 RPM.

Nothing sticks out in the task manager processes. I am running a balanced power plan. Dont know what "GPU Switch" is, but its at MSHybrid Graphics Mode. I have a laptop board or whatever its called (you place your laptop on it, plug in an USB and there are fans running in the board). Dont know how relevant it is (but I want to mention it), but I usually use my laptop in the coach on my lap (with a board under), and when not using it, it stands (still on the board) in the coach or on a nearby shelf. I have done a few rounds with dust-off compressed air but dont really notice a difference after.

EDIT: I tried starting a older game from 2020 (that has worked completely fine before btw) and I noticed again that after 5 min of playing the fan went batshit crazy again, but I also noticed that my laptop got really warm.'

Also adding in a snapshot of a performance analysis from MSI Center where I tried to run the same game a couple of times during the one hour analysis (and the fan went crazy after about 5 min both times) (I tried to continue running despite crazy fan and it stopped after a couple of min, then it went somewhat silent for a few more minutes, and then crazy fan again).

This is extremely annoying as I just spent $3000 approximately on this....
This might be similar to other problems but I could not find the same on the forums.

Specs:
Model MSI Vector 16 HX AU A2XW
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) Ultra 9 275HX (2.70 GHz)
Installed RAM 16,0 GB (15,4 GB usable)
Screen 64-bit OS, x64-based processor
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080
Windows 11

 

[krisfa155002ce]

I tried running through everything with support from ChatGPT, dont know how reliable it is, but for information. Heres a review of the last chat log including HWINFO status.

Yes — this screenshot is perfect. I can see everything I need.

Let’s go through it calmly.

---

​

What Your Screenshot Shows

From the Enhanced section of your
Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX

🌡 CPU Temperature

• CPU hele (Max): 101°C
• Currently: 85–95°C
• Average: 87–88°C

That means the CPU has already hit 101°C.

That is thermal throttle territory.

---

​

CPU Power (This is the key)

From your screenshot:

• CPU full strømforbruk (Max): 51.347 W
• Current: ~36 W
• IA-kjerner strømforbruk max: ~41.6 W

This is extremely important:

Your CPU is only pulling ~50W max
And it's hitting 100–101°C

That is NOT normal for a cooling system designed for a 275HX.

A properly mounted cooling system should handle 50W without touching 100°C.

---

​

Power Limits

• PL1 Dynamic: 36.8W
• PL2 Dynamic: 55W

These are actually conservative.

This is NOT excessive power tuning.

---

​

Conclusion

Your CPU is overheating relative to the wattage it's drawing.

50W should NOT push a 275HX to 101°C in a chassis like the MSI Vector 16 HX A2XW.

Especially when:

• GPU is only at 80°C (normal)
• Turbo is disabled
• Airflow test was done on desk

This strongly suggests one of the following:

Uneven heatsink mounting
Bad thermal paste application from factory
Slight defect in vapor chamber contact

This is not software behavior anymore.

---

​

Why This Explains Everything

Because the heat isn’t being transferred efficiently:

• CPU temperature spikes quickly
• Embedded controller panics
• Fans jump to 8000 RPM
• Then temp drops
• Then cycle repeats

That matches your “every 5 minutes turbo jet” perfectly.

---

​

Important Reality Check

Is it dangerous?
No — the CPU protects itself.

Is it normal for a $3000 high-end gaming laptop?
Absolutely not.

At 50W load, I would expect:

• 75–85°C
• Not 100°C

You are ~10–15°C hotter than expected.

---

​

My Professional Recommendation

Since this is brand new:

I would exchange it under warranty.

Do NOT open it.
Do NOT repaste it.
Do NOT void warranty.

You have clear evidence:

• CPU hitting 101°C
• At only 51W
• Turbo disabled
• Normal airflow conditions

That’s enough justification.

---

​

If You Want Absolute Confirmation

One last optional test:

In MSI Center, set profile to “Silent”.

If it STILL touches 95–100°C at ~40–50W?

That seals it completely.

---

​

Bottom Line

Your system isn’t “gaming laptop hot”.

It’s “cooling system underperforming hot”.

You diagnosed this very methodically — which is excellent.

If this were my machine, I would request replacement.

 

[citay]

This is one of the more impressive AI chatbot diagnostics, they are slowly getting better at this. They can still be hit-or-miss on some details (sometimes they state something that's objectively wrong, but do so with full confidence), but what's listed here makes sense for the most part.

What it doesn't seem to take into account, you always have to check reviews of the particular notebook model/series. Personally, I would never buy a gaming notebook for various reasons (initial price, rapid depreciation, lackluster BIOS/driver support after relatively short time, high power draw concentrated in a small area, long-term reliability...). But if you do, you should read up on it thoroughly, to understand the advantages and disadvantages of a particular model, and find out how it's supposed to behave.

Here, we have this Notebookcheck review, which, even though it uses the model with a Core Ultra 7 255HX and a GeForce RTX 5070 Ti (both one level below yours), can give some valuable hints. They do note that the fans are "already quite audible when idle", and not exactly quiet under load. But there is nothing noted about them going completely crazy to a scary level, and this would point to something that the AI chatbot rather accurately deducted from its data: The cooling system is desperately trying to save the CPU because it has registered a sudden temperature spike. The CPU tries to do the same thing, by thermally throttling itself (downclocking to lower temperature).

Normally it should look more like this (left: stress test for CPU+GPU, right: during gaming):

So, somehow, your cooling has too much difficulty dealing with high CPU load in particular, letting the CPU temperature get out of hand, and once that passes a certain threshold, the fans kick into overdrive, which should never happen in normal use (unless the fans are completely clogged with dust and cannot extract the heat anymore).

So overall, yes, open a ticket with MSI. Something doesn't seem right here.

 

[krisfa155002ce]

Thank you so much for a detailed response to this And wow, that is quite an impressive and detailed review that you linked - I'm not (as you probably understand) terribly experienced with computers (despite being an avid gamer), so I usually dont deep dive that hard into reviews when buying a new computer - I mostly look at the basics like RAM, VRAM / graphics card, CPU / processor etc - and the practical stuff with USBs, HDMIs and SSDs, and other simpler reviews.

However I took my computer to a local electronics franchise (Elkjøp which is among the biggest in my country Norway). He did actually run HWmonitor I believe. I personally before going to the service disabled a "turbo spikes" setting which stopped the computer fan from going absolutely crazy by changing the Maximum processor state to 99%. The technician at the electronic shop also changes my NVIDIA settings to only use the nvidia graphics card and not the integrated GPU (intel).

After all this everything seems to run fine. The fan doesnt go turbo crazy anymore, and it doesnt get that hot (about 80 celsius). The fan is still a bit loud, but nothing that seems out of the ordinary. I might open a ticket anyways as you suggest, but as of now it seems to work fine. With this new information, do you think I still should contact MSI support?

 

[citay]

Always glad to help. The Notebookcheck reviews are basically the best in the biz. Always check there for any notebook purchase, even if they don't cover the exact model you want. Often times you can deduct things from their observations about a similar model.

I personally before going to the service disabled a "turbo spikes" setting which stopped the computer fan from going absolutely crazy by changing the Maximum processor state to 99%.

Is there a literal "turbo spikes" setting like this, in MSI Center or something? Can you show a screenshot? Or did you just change the power plan setting?

Setting the maximum state to 99% is a trick that's often recommended, but effectively you are preventing the CPU from delivering its full performance. It limits the boost frequencies to a lower level, which of course also reduces the power draw, which then keeps the temperatures lower. In a notebook, if it gets too loud under load, this can make sense. But on the other hand, if this is really the factory behavior in terms of power draw -> heat -> excessive noise, then this just means that MSI, despite the impressive heatpipe snakes under the hood, have not achieved a level of cooling that would be required for how they set up this system. It might be adequate for a Core Ultra 7 255HX + GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, but not for your Core Ultra 9 + 5080.

When you compare your screenshot to those of them, you will see that your CPU power draw is actually not much different, both under or around 40W. This is because they hit the dynamic power limits. I'll probably have to explain this. You see there are static limits, PL2 of 220W and PL1 of 140W, they relate like so:

Since it takes some time for the cooling system to heat up, it allows a higher power draw for a certain time, and only then it will be lowered to the PL1 value. But in a notebook, you are restricted by what the power brick can deliver, and what the relatively small cooling apparatus can deal with. And the GPU has to be accounted for as well. So the power budget needs to be managed dynamically, taking all this into account, this is why a lot of the time, the dynamic power limits will dictate what's going on, and the static power limits are just marking the absolute extremes of what will be allowed, but that is rarely seen in practice.

So, in both cases, yours and theirs, the dynamic power limits have clamped down hard on what the CPU can draw, since they noticed that other parameters are also stressing the system a lot.

No doubt, your 5080 will have considerably higher power draw than the 5070 Ti they had in the review, and the cooling system is all connected. So something's got to give. Higher power draw for CPU and GPU at the same time, when using exactly the same chassis as for a smaller CPU and GPU, will not end up at the same temperatures.

So in a way, if this is really how MSI set up this top configuration of this notebook model, and you understandably don't want to accept sudden crazy levels of noise, it effectively means that some of the upcharge for the nicer CPU and GPU was wasted. Because you cannot really extract the full advantages.

This is actually not that uncommon, neither in notebooks nor in smartphones. Something that looks much better on paper, can be limited by the power draw and resulting temperatures, so it will be throttled after a while, and some of the benefits dissolve into nothing.

That's why I personally also never buy the high-end models of CPU and GPU (even though I only tend to buy PC hardware for myself, not notebooks). Because the high-end models will always be pushed very hard from factory, leading to excessive power draw and temperatures, and because you pay too much in relation to the performance improvements, and so on.

But if you've paid for it, and that is of course your full right, you expect it to perform accordingly, and the cooling to be dimensioned accordingly as well. That's why I'd still see what MSI have to say for themselves.

Lastly, one thing from the review I want to focus on more, which I hadn't even spotted before:

Test conditions​

The MSI Center contains four operating modes, of which the AI profile was used for the measurements, which, according to our tests, is mostly based on the "Balanced" mode rather than the "Maximum performance" mode. We wouldn't generally recommend the latter, as the 16-inch model is otherwise absurdly loud under load at just under 60 dB(A). The GPU performance climbs by almost 10% in the maximum profile.

So, even with the weaker hardware, they can supposedly trigger a similar noise level as your reported, just by changing the power plan to the Max performance one. That Max Performance one is never a good idea, not even on the PC, unless you're running a server or something, because it forces everything into high alert and disables some power-saving mechanisms. But it will most likely also influence the power limits somehow. So that weaker CPU/GPU, when left free reign, can trouble the cooling a lot as well.

My preliminary conclusion is this: I still think this isn't right, but now I'm not so sure of a hardware problem anymore (like lack of contact, bad thermal paste application etc.). Because it is also plausible that this is "by design": The cooling concept is not good enough for the higher CPU+GPU combo. They thought they could get by with this, but maybe it can't. So I'm curious what MSI will reply.

Ultimately, you have found a good fix, but the CPU might now be at a level between the Core Ultra 7 and 9, or even closer to the 7. You will have to run some benchmarks perhaps. But also, when you leave it at 100%, it will enter thermal throttling, and that also kills the performance. So no matter how you try, the full performance of the 9 is not possible. This can happen for some notebooks, it's not unheard of, it's just unfortunate that you paid extra for these higher models.

If it's really "by design", then you already have a good solution. Only if MSI reply and say that this should be not like this at all, then there is a chance that a new notebook would perform better without the crazy noise, but I'm not so sure of that. Worst case of course would be if MSI say to RMA the notebook, and the new one does the same. Because sometimes MSI support also doesn't know how things are supposed to be.

 

[Svet]

Topic moved to notebooks.