I’ll do a bit more research along the lines you suggested (not that I expect to get anything out of Dell). I tried a package i8kutils which is supposed to offer fan control for some unspecified list of Dell laptops, but it didn’t work on mine. Not very relevant now as I’ve expunged Windows. Windows, by contrast, must have the drivers & service to take over fan control, because under it fans were much more responsive (off/silent most of the time & spinning up when there’s a bit of load). Indeed if I reboot into the BIOS config, I see exactly the same fan behaviour. Fedora doesn’t do so (I think) so the behaviour I’m seeing reflects what the BIOS does. I assumed the OS was in control, but it seems that the BIOS is by default, and with appropriate drivers etc the OS can take over. What is left is to max out the fans.I’ve done a bit of reading since posting - and though info is fragmentary & scattered I found enough to realise I didn’t have the right mental model of what’s going on. I can choose the power plan to High Performance which corresponds to the performance thermal profile in AWCC. I do not wish to update Windows 10 and re-bloat it. What G-mode does is, it activates the performance thermal profile if it's not the active profile and it maxes out the internal fans over the CPU and GPU.īoth Windows 11 and Windows 10 are fully debloated and optimized however in Windows 10 I manually installed the Dell Alienware Command Center program but it doesn't work as it requires Windows to be updated. On Windows 11, the Dell Alienware Command Center is installed by default and the only use I make of this program is selecting the thermal profile:performance and activating G-mode by pressing F9/G on my keyboard. On my Dell G15 5511 SE laptop, the main operating system is Windows 11 but quite recently I decided to make a small partition to install Windows 10 on it and make a comparison of performance in terms of gaming.

Dell laptop fan controller