Turned out that a Nouveau driver was loaded when I installed Mint. Long story short, the fan that was maxed out in Mint was the Nvidia GPU which I didn't see pop up in sensors-detect at all. What it did show was something that initially confused me - a nouveau device which it couldn't get any information on. After I ran pwmconfig, I was able to see some of the fans, but not the Nvidia GPU. I installed xsensors and it was able to pick up all the case fans and the CPU and they were running at relatively low speeds (it is cold in my room). I saw the arch linux thread and did install lm-sensors but sensors-detect had difficulty seeing any fans at all though it did give me the core temps. I have to lower the threshold to 300 to boot anything. That said, every time I lose power, the bios resets to alarm if the fans are lower than 600 rpm which appears to be the default but the fans are always turning much slower on a cold boot. They are really cheap and silent nowadays.Thank you ClixTrix - I do let bios control the fans. If you really want to run your CPU without fan, I suggest you to check that the heat sink is clean (without dust on it) and the thermal conducting paste is properly applied between the CPU and the heat sink.Įven more, though, I suggest you to just buy another fan. I do not know how much old is your computer, but probably the last consumer CPUs that could be safely used with just a passive heat sink were Intel Pentium, maybe Pentium 2, and AMDs of the same epoch, which is now really old. Of course, as other have already said, this expose your CPU to permanent damage. At next reboot your BIOS may complain that the fan is not working (it does so in order to protect the CPU from overheating), but in this case you can probably disable the check. If you really want to stop the fan, you should probably just open the computer and detach the cable connecting the fan to the motherboard. There is probably no way to stop the CPU fan from software, especially if you use an old computer.

Linux cpu fan control