We expect gaming notebooks to have aggressive — and often loud — cooling systems to keep those powerful processors and GPUs from melting down. That’s particularly true for thinner gaming machines that cram the same components into svelte frames that force fans to work overtime.
What we don’t expect, though, is for the fans to keep running even when the system isn’t working hard, and even worse when it’s just idling. Apparently, that’s exactly what owners of 2016 Razer Blade notebooks have been suffering from, and fortunately Razer is working on a fix, as Windows Central reports.
As is often the case, the issue was identified on Razer’s Insider community, where a number of users have reported that their fans work constantly and far more loudly than necessary when their Razer Blades are at rest. The affected systems are 2016 models that use sixth-generation Intel Skylake processors as opposed to the newer Kaby Lake models.
As one user put it, “I got my Blade yesterday and I noticed fan noise right away even when idled. I set the fan to low in Synapse but still would randomly turn on even when I wasn’t doing anything. I called customer support and the agent told me that this was “normal” because it meant the fans were doing their job.”
The good news is, Razer is aware of the problem and eventually posted a response on the forums:
“We know we have been quiet in regard to all of the feedback, and wanted to openly clarify that we are looking into this and that our engineering team is working hard on a firmware update to finetune the fan-temperature curve which will reduce the noise when the Razer Blade is at idle. We understand that although this noise you’re experiencing is an annoyance, there are no functional or performance issues as a result of this.”
Razer didn’t provide an estimate on when the issue would be addressed, but Razer Blade owners can at least take some solace in the knowledge that a fix is underway. For now, the company stresses that there’s no harm in running the systems as is, other than the annoyance at having a system that’s louder than it should be.