T440p: tame the roaring beast inside

[Per Astra Ad Deum]

Hi there,

I've been running a T440p as a daily driver for quite some time now, but one thing bothers me from the very beginning.

The damn fan is obnoxious. It's not the noise per se, mind you, but the frenzy by which it kicks into action. From zero-fan-mode to a few thousand RPMs, a whipping sound followed by a phase of ~30 seconds of moderately fan noise. Afterwards, the fan stops until it's waken again by the temp threshold being reached.
It's super annoying, you either end up with setting a custom fan curve and basically eliminating zero-fan-mode so you have a constant noise instead of a repeating whipping-into-action, or you just give up entirely and wear headphones all the time.

I'm running the Delta Fan, which is even supposed to be the quietest. But it doesn't matter, nor does the TDP of the CPU or the thermal compound used in this regard: all these factors have influence on how soon the threshold is reached, but once it's reached, the fan howls up like a jet taking off.

The only thing I could possible think of to mitigate this issue is by changing the RPM values of the different fan speed levels, like e.g. implementing a level in between zero and the first one, so the noise ramps up steadily instead of whipping into full action.

Is anyone here able to implement such a modification? Or can someone think of a different approach on this matter?

Best regards

[M4980]

I used TPFanControl for this on my T440p, you can set a custom fan curve for  smart mode in the ini file

TPFanControl – ThinkPad-Wiki (thinkwiki.de)