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08-28-2011, 03:25 PM
(This post was last modified: 08-28-2011, 03:30 PM by Mumak.)
Hey guys, I'm jumping into this thread since I spent lot of time disassembing various Alienware BIOSes including their EC parts, mostly to find out how fan control works there.
What I can say for sure, is that the BIOS or VBIOS have nothing to do with fan control here - it's solely controlled by the EC firmware (Compal).
The EC code is not easy to understand, but what I know so far is that I'm unable to control the fan speed independently for each fan.. the whole EC-BIOS interface seems to be a bit 'unfinished' or better said "not well designed"... I also noticed some EC registers where they store the mid/high fan speed settings which are applied at least on certain places (but that doesn't allow to change the temperature/PWM trip point)...
What I can do now (in HWiNFO32/64) is to control the fan speed. There were some stability issues (probably caused by EC-ACPI conflicts), but it seems that's resloved in the latest Beta version.
If you have already knowledge about Compal EC design, then it should be easy to do what you want, since most Compal designs follow the same design matrix.. Project code for M18x is "PAR10"