Finally, you’ll need to save your BIOS changes and reboot your laptop. Here, you can adjust the fan speed for each fan.

In the BIOS, there will be a section for fan control. Second, you’ll need to find the correct BIOS settings. There are typically two fans: the CPU fan and the GPU fan. First, you’ll need to identify which fan you want to control. Shoutout to Tom Freudenberg for creating dell-bios-fan-control and for pointing me to disabling SECURE_BOOT when I got the Operation not permitted error.If you want to change the fan speed on your Alienware laptop, there are a few things you need to know. It can easily be configured using pwmonfig (which ships with it) and adds itself as a system service. Now that your BIOS/UEFI is no longer controlling the fan, you have to take care of it on your own. Your fan should now run at the highest possible settings without the BIOS/UEFI interfering.Ĭontrolling the fan in day to day business If you want to quickly test, you can use i8kutils: git clone You can now go and check solutions for controlling the fan that suite your needs. Output should now be BIOS CONTROL DISABLED. You need to go to your BIOS/UEFI and disable SECURE BOOT. If you get an error like this ioperm:: Operation not permitted It might work for you (and others) as well. Looks like the bias still takes control after for some reason. The fan control works now for a limited time (1 second). $ sudo modprobe dell-smm-hwmon restricted=0 Looking at this bug report solution ( ), I force loaded the modules sudo rmmod dell-smm-hwmon Returns 0 0, rather than the earlier -1 -1. Why is am8ctl not able to set the fan speeds? I have no issues turning BIOS control on, but I need the fan speed at max at times, which the BIOS is not doing due to some weird reasons.

Returns 0 0 indicating that no fans are on, as the BIOS fan control has been disabled. I think this means that the fan speed setting was not successful. I followed the instructions in answer, succesfully disabling the BIOS fan control. I am trying to control the fan speed manually using the i8kctl package for dell laptops.

Dell fan speed control