Best Minipc Forum

Hi, on my AK3 with Intel J4125 the Cpu temperature is running as high as 87,8C or 190F. The vent is almost constantly on & off with average operating temp of around 63C or 145F.
Is it normal? My use is absolutely standard, ie work from home with no video call or heavy apps running.
I am attaching a picture of the temp monitor app.

The fan keep going for 8h work day is very very disturbing...I know is an issue we are discussing, but I am reaching the point I would rather sell the pc, lose some money and change it. I really hope the issue will be solved shortly.

Thanks for your feedback.
A

Hello, according to the table, there is no abnormal situation. If you are not satisfied with the temperature control, you can put it in a more ventilated position.

Andy T I am not sure if you saw my posts here viewtopic.php?f=38&t=732 but mine was similar. The replacement blower fan made a difference but then my original had stopped running after a few days use. The extra fan underneath in the base I printed means the CPU now runs at about 40^C most of the time and the SSD I added is now in the 30's. Before I added the extra fan they were both up in the 50's. I added it because I didn't trust the internal cooling fan or control system to provide enough reliable cooling. I was also wanting to keep the SSD temperature down as it is getting hot air from the CPU.
The CPU temperature does change incredibly quickly on these devices and I still see occasional high peaks but generally the temperatures are under control. The 24v fan running on 12v does make a slight noise but doesn't matter in my situation.
I am running it headless on Win 10 with RealVNC server and VirtualBox with Home Assistant on it so not a huge load but I did have one recent occasion when the CPU temperature seemed high and checking Task Manager it was VNC, VBox or HA, but that was cured by a reboot. I set Argus to message me if it goes above 80^C as if I set it much lower it still flags a warning momentarily when rebooting due to the very fast temperature changes. I could set the warning quite a bit lower if I lived with the message when rebooting. I might do that sometime.
Not sure if you are into 3d printing but I can let you have a file if you want.

Thanks AJC for your reply. Yes I saw your original post and find it very usefull, even if I am not going to follow your path, mainly because of the 3D printing stuff and wire cutting.
Btw, Are you using Argus just to monitor the temps or have you managed to make changes to the fan setup through them? My version doesn’t allow to do so, due to bios restriction I believe.

What I did was to remove both the external cover and the ssd support to cool down more the Cpu, in addition to put the vent working in free air, and it is working.

But honestly I am very disappointed to have to do so in order to limit the vent intervention.

No I couldn't control the fan speed from Argus. That would have been ideal. I do control fan speeds on my main pc and it works very well. Almost silent. It is still very useful for you to have an email if the temperature is excessive if used unattended.
I did originally think of raising the SSD and the lid but having seen how the internal fan control seemed a bit random and didn't cut in until 70^c or so I decided to put the other fan in so if the internal one didn't cut in or failed at least I had some other cooling. I found that the external one brings the normal temperature down by about 20^C when lightly loaded so it is at a lot better temperature to start with when a load is applied. The external fan did have much more effect than opening up the drive area and lid. I didn't cut any wires, just used a Y-adapter in the power supply lead.
Having replaced the faulty internal fan I did notice that the temperatures seemed lower without the internal fan running. I don't know if this was definitely the case as I don't know what the cpu was doing before compared to after but it did seem to be a fair bit lower. The only thing I could attribute it to was putting new heatsink compound on.
If anyone is interested I have now put it on Thingiverse and is here https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4771649.

AndyT wrote: ↑Mon Feb 22, 2021 10:28 am Thanks AJC for your reply. Yes I saw your original post and find it very usefull, even if I am not going to follow your path, mainly because of the 3D printing stuff and wire cutting.
Btw, Are you using Argus just to monitor the temps or have you managed to make changes to the fan setup through them? My version doesn’t allow to do so, due to bios restriction I believe.

What I did was to remove both the external cover and the ssd support to cool down more the Cpu, in addition to put the vent working in free air, and it is working.

But honestly I am very disappointed to have to do so in order to limit the vent intervention.

We will invite more users like AJC to suggest improvements to our fans. We are very sorry for the inconvenience caused. If you want to replace the fan, our after-sales staff can help you: service@iacepc.com