Surface Pro 3 - Excessively loud fan, constant overheating during idle and light tasks (now on my second, third, fourth Surface Pro 3 i7)

Emilie,

I am on my 2nd Surface Pro 3. The first one ran impeccably but was accidentally dropped which resulted in a cracked screen. Since it was still under warranty, I was able to pay the required fee and get my 2nd. When I received the 2nd one, it seemed to be racked with issues. As soon as I took it out of the box, I installed a screen protector and a case to avoid a repeat of the accident that killed my first Surface Pro 3. Almost immediately, I noticed the excessive fan noise and the overheating issues. In fact that's what drew me to this forum. I removed the case, removed the screen protector, and none of these remedies seemed to help. I was ready to return it to Microsoft. I even installed a program to monitor CPU temperature and it was constantly running somewhere between 75-90 degrees Celsius after starting around the mid 40's right after reboot.

The one thing that I read on this and similar forums was to make sure and install all updates and patches, especially any bios/firmware fixes. By this point, I was several hours into turning it on and the updates and patches were still installing despite all the issues that seemed to be ocurring. Performance seemed poor and the heat/fan issues persisted. And like you, I think my Surface Pro 3 even shutdown a couple times with what I thought was problems with heat. The screen went black and there would be no response for long periods before a reboot would eventually occur. Sometimes I even restarted it out of sheer frustration and lack of patience. 

But luckily, I persevered. I kept up with the patch and hotfix installations. I even noticed that sometimes it would complete installing and when I would go back to check its status manually, more hot fixes and updates would appear. Since some of the patches are cumulative and can't be installed before others are installed, it took maybe 5 or 6 hours before all the patches were installed. My shutting the system down before some completed, I'm sure didn't help the process. I was really ready to ship the product back. In addition to the heat/fan problem, I even experienced issues with the screen. There was a single spot on the screen that would act like someone was constantly tapping it. I could see the screen reaction and could not seem to get control of the mouse cursor. I even noticed that the ghost tapping seemed to occur right over the spot where the back of the unit was the hottest. I figured it too was a result of the heat/fan issue. I was really too through.

Needless to say, one of the last updates to get installed was a bios/firmware update. Whatever was in this update seemed to address all of the hardware issues I was having. The fan which ran hot constantly now seemed to just spike during intensive processing and would immediately drop back down to average between 45 and 55 degrees Celsius. Even the ghost tapping was gone. 

Moral of the story... don't give up on your Surface Pro 3 just yet. I've had this 2nd one now for about 45 days and it's a completely different computer than the one that I unboxed that 1st day. The first 24-48 hours is very key. Keep going back to check for updates and don't stop until you've rebooted a couple times and checked a couple times and no additional updates appear. Reserve your judgment until then because you might have the same issue I did.

Good luck!

Ed

Hi Emilie,

I had exactly the same feeling about my surface. I owned a Surface pro 2 before and I loved it's features. When I went for the Pro 3 it was because it was adding an incredibly physical feeling to it (the 2 was way chunkier and heavier).

I just want to share my experience, now that I have been using for work daily. 

FIrst: it is not nice to be constantly concern about the heat and the fan. For most of the time is off now, but from time to time it starts and I am always worried about to which level it will increase. Also because I am often in meetings or in presence with other people, and I am the only one in my company to have gone (and at my expenses) for the Surface instead of the iMac that this company gives (for free!) to its employes.

Having said that, in more than 7 months using it daily for everything going from excel (very heavy projects), word, e-mails etc, it behaved without any issue. The fan never really was a problem. It kicks in every time there is an update being installed in background, for some reason, but always at a very quiet level. 

My friends and colleagues with the alternative solution, have their macbook pro's fan going from time to time as well, and I would add maybe at a tiny higher volume.

At home I also use it for light staff like Netflix and other streaming, and I have no issue.

WIth heavier application, such as Cakewalk Sonar, or FL-Studio, or Sony Vegas, it also behaves silently, except during rendering phases, which even my desktop would start cooling by fan.

The thing that I really don't like about the surface pro 3 or of mine at least is that certain things though will start the fan and in my opinion they should not if the object didn't have an intrinsic problem. Things like opening the xbox music app, and play any playlist or radio with the art cover maximized. The app will animate very pleasantly the various pictures related to the artist, using gentle zooming and panning on full screen and that is enough to bring the CPU at about 7% an the fan quietly starts. This is sad.

On the other hands, I ran complicated programming in excel and nothing happen.

My experience on working with this device is something extremely pleasant. I can go to meeting bringing my light surface as if it was a thin note-book, while all my colleagues walk with their macbook pro sitting on the forearms, their screen opened not to lose their session I guess, and their paper note-book placed on top, looking like sleepwalkers and struggling and helping each other for simple things like opening a door, pushing the button for the elevator, etc.

I can take notes, draw a sketch of anything we discussed, all while I am presenting, by flipping between oneNote and the desktop. I have all my notes of the past 7 months all arranged in my one note file, and I can just do a simple search to get the information I want, while my colleagues flips frantically the pages of their notebooks left and right. 

Almost all my files are on the one drive, or some other cloud solution, so I am ok should my pro 3 incur in some permanent problem..

Long reply, i realize, but I wanted to try to share my conflicting opinion about this device.

It is unacceptable and ultimately very sad that there are such fundamental design flaws.

And I still didn't understand whether this is something common to all the pro 3, or some is worse. I tried to run a poll asking to perform the test of the xbox music app, but no much replies on the topic there.

Yet, I accepted to continued despite this, because the alternative of a no-touch screen macbook pro, no capability to draw, no double click my pen to capture a slide being presented on my lync on the fly... and so much more was to me worse. 

Ultimately, the fan of my device never embarrassed me in front of my colleagues, no more than their fan, at least. So, I kept it. Who knows if I did the right thing on the long term. I can only hope.

Cheers,

/Flavio

Considering I have only had it for a day with not considerable use or significant downloads, it is absolutely  appalling to discover that this device is as prone to overheating  as it is. This factor makes it hard to believe that this product could be anything but cumbersome. How could anyone possibly get anything done with it?

You can't consider this so-called overheating a problem until it actually results in unwanted, abnormal operational behavior. I think your post is premature. Play around with it a bit more and see if a hot Surface  3 backside causes any computing problems for you.

So I've had this device for 24 hours and have only ever used the device on its kickstand. It gets EXCESSIVELY hot on the back, so the fan kicks in (moderate white sound at first) and reaches a volume of what I can only compare to an "exaggerated shush". It scared me at first, so I closed any open applications I was not immediately using, but the sound and overheating persisted. I decided to disconnect the keyboard accessory. No improvements.

I haven't bought a case or anything yet, as I've only had it a day, so this is the bare product overheating on itself. Despite my only having one application open, Spotify, the noise grew irritable. Because of this, I shut down the device, charged it completely, unplugged it, waited twenty minutes, and presumed to finish my online class. The noise and over ninety-degree temperature of the back immediately returned. 

Making matters worse, I have not had the product shut down for any installation or updates, yet it has for overheating. Considering I have only had it for a day with not considerable use or significant downloads, it is absolutely  appalling to discover that this device is as prone to overheating  as it is. This factor makes it hard to believe that this product could be anything but cumbersome. How could anyone possibly get anything done with it?

I am completely dissatisfied with this. I paid nearly 1400 in expenses for this product and I fear the overheating would render the device unsafe to protect all of my files and documents for my next year in college. As hostile as this may seem, I believe this is a brilliant innovation. I do absolutely love nearly all of the features of the product and have yet to learn some of its more intricate facets, but this chink in the armor is difficult to ignore. The basic functions of the device is the foundation of it entirely, and as it stands, I do not trust it. I wish I would have invested my time and money into something more resourceful.

Thank you for your time

I think we are after better CPU voltage settings. For some reason the temperature of the CPU "jumps" literally to 90 degrees under some stress situations (eg. 100% CPU usage).

If we use, with default settings, the CPU at 100%, the fan wakes up within about 30 seconds...

The fact is that when the CPU reach high temperatures, it will cool down slowly so the fan will stay on for a while, before slowing down again, and if no other substantial task was asked in between.

I think the CPU should not reach such temperature that fast by default with a tablet customer base. It can be quickly misleading to have a tablet that runs directly hot, out of box, because the customer expect a silent and discreet device (all tablets are always very silent).

Assuming that all the updates were installed, it is possible to delay a lot the thermal throttling (so the fan start up) by using Intel XTU utility.

We can always revert back to processing intensive configuration(s) if we need very urgent calculations / processing horse-power (must be really urgent these days with a i7...).

The following settings apply to my i7-4650u (fully updated 8.1 Surface Pro 3 256Gb model) and are kind of very quiet :

Turbo Boost Short Power Max : 8 W

Turbo Boost Power Max : 8 W

As a result, the CPU takes a lot more time to reach high temperatures under 100% processing charge.

I am really ok with the idea to give away few flops when using small applications. I may use very intensive processing programs but it is rare compared to casual ones (mail, web / youtube, word, movies, etc..).

And all this keep the whole system quiet along with keeping the CPU cool, as well as saving battery life.

The default settings were simply a bit too "aggressive" for me.

Of course, we are severely impairing the performance of the i7 CPU with 8W, but it is far enough for casual utilization and we know we can switch back to more intensive CPU power plans if needed.

Intel XTU is also a great monitoring tool that helps keeping an eye on various thing. One can create several XTU power plans. The SP3 stays perfectly quiet with the one I use more often.