Surface Studio 2 - extremely loud fans

Anonymous
2019-02-06T21:10:11+00:00

My Surface Studio 2 finally arrived today. The machine is a total beauty, I love it to pieces - fits my workflow perfectly. Only thing I really don't love is the fan noise. Even when just doing some file renaming or opening MS Word, the fans spin up to an extremely annoying level. I don't mind a low-level fan constantly going and I don't care if the fan speeds up when doing some heavy photo editing or gaming - but I'm talking blow-dryer here while the system is simply idling. According to task manager, the CPU is less than 3% busy here. 

Can someone confirm this is normal? Should I RMA the machine?

Surface | Surface Studio | Power and battery

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Anonymous
2019-12-04T16:35:50+00:00

Hello

We have released an update for Surface Studio 2 that does some optimization of the Fan based on processor utilization.  It is currently available on Windows Update.  Please try installing it and see if it resolves your issue.  You can see more information about the update on the Surface Studio 2 Update History Page.

Marking as "Answered" to raise visibility

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  1. Anonymous
    2019-02-28T05:28:50+00:00

    Hi All,

    I just got my surface studio 2 this morning and have been using it very lightly so far with quite loud fan noise. My CPU utilisation is around 6% and the speed varies anything from 1.3 GHz to 3.6 GHz.

    Does anyone have any resolution on this?

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-02-27T21:06:39+00:00

    Keep me updated on how things go - I wonder if the machine stays quiet. 

    Another question: when looking in the device manager, do you now see the Intel on-board graphics alongside the NVidia?

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-02-23T15:57:34+00:00

    I have managed to sort the issue out. It is however not a quick fix.

    The answer is to do a full recovery device reset and re-install then download the latest Surface studio 2 Firmware and drivers .msi package putting in a totally fresh OS and driver build.

    After completing this .. 1 - 2 hours all told the Surface Studio 2 feels very quick and quiet, just like it should have been when it arrived !!!

    Honestly it feels like a completely different machine, everything is so much more stable and snappy. I was having many error, shutdowns and crashes in sleep mode, netflix closing down randomly. None of the above is happening any more, even the Surface bluetooth headphones connect and disconnect and work better.

    The gpu 3D and video decode load using 4k video say on Youtube is 1/3 of what was being used before. I have no idea what the factory install did, but QA really need to step thier game up.

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-02-20T18:04:26+00:00

    I did some experimenting today and have narrowed the issue down to the GPU drivers.  For starters, the integrated Intel HD 620 graphics can't be enabled. It doesn't show up in the device manager and any attempt to install the drivers directly from Intel fails as the installer allegedly won't find the graphics card.

    This leads to even the simplest tasks running unnecessarily on the NVidia GPU. In my case, it constantly runs at over 55 degrees celsius and keeps the fans running at medium to high the entire time. I tried to update the drivers with the latest ones from NVidia, but apparently Microsoft won't let you do that either - "hardware not found" every time. The ones that come installed with the Studio 2 are fairly dated.

    Microsoft has also decided to remove the NVidia control panel, so no way to control the GPUs behavior. 

    So all of this seems to be a software issue - I hope someone from the MS hardware team reads this and can offer a timely fix, as the problem is driving me absolutely bonkers. I'm very close to selling the machine and going back to an iMac.

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