I was lucky enough to find a good deal on eBay for a good NUC to help build out my Home Lab. As an EUC/VMware Mobility Specialist I’m not looking to run any massive vSphere/vSAN deployments, just a nice box to run the usual suspects (AD, ADCS, Unified Access Gateway) to give me everything I need.
Unfortunately, I started running my setup during what should be known as the end of times in the UK (June/July 2018) where temperatures hardly dropped below 27 during the day. This meant keeping my kit cool was difficult so I put it down a a bit more ambient heat than usual. When I started getting some major fan noise due to an issue with Azure AD Connect services taking more CPU, I decided to try and change some settings to resolve it.
A quick Google Search came up with quite a few others seeing the same thing. https://communities.intel.com/thread/124829 had a lot of discussion and had some great tips.
The below settings were where I started:
This had a massive impact on fan noise nearly instantly. However, what I did note is that as soon as I fired up a browser on Windows Server (so a bit of CPU was being used, still under 20%), the Fan shot up again.
- Try changing the Primary Temp Sensor from Processor to PCH. PCH stands for Platform Control Hub, and the temperature reading is more of a wider chipset temp reading vs. the processor itself.
This helped out a lot. After a few months of running the NUC the fan noise is very minimal.
Next Steps:
- Add better thermal paste to the CPU.