Thread: Gateway LX6810 BIOS and fan issues. Help!

I purchased a Gateway LX6810 a little while ago. Later I upgraded the video card, sound card, power supply, added another hard drive, and put in more case fans. Gateway neglected to include ANY case fans, and the unit overheated often.

The problem I am having is with controlling the fans and the BIOS. Basically, there is no control available (through BIOS or Speed fan). They came out with a recent BIOS update (which I installed), and the only change I can see is the CPU fan runs at 3250 RPM instead of 1400 RPM. It appears to me that Gateway realized they built it wrong, so they increased the fan speed of the CPU.

Now it is loud and annoying. I can't change any of the speeds. Overheating is not an issue because I installed more case fans appropriately. My issue is with the BIOS and controlling fan speed. Is there any way around this? Can I flash the BIOS to unlock it? Am I doing something wrong?

I am contemplating just putting a new motherboard in. I am sick of dealing with Gateway.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I had the same problem. What I did was install a fan controller. The controller controls the speed of the CPU fan. With it I lowered it down to to around 1600 rpm then I installed a silent fan for exhaust 120mm in the back and a silent fan for intake 80mm, in the front.

The thing is that if you install a new motherboard the gateway oem version of vista that came with your pc most likely will not work with it. You will have to find some modified bios for it to work or buy a new copy of vista.


Well both of these options are not exactly easy. You have to know what you’re doing. I went the fan controller way but I had to do a little mod to my fan controller because the connector for the Gateway cpu fan is 4 pins and my fan controller was 3 pin.
The 4th pin only controls the fan speed the other 3 pins are the same. So on the fan controller connector I had to cut the side of it off. Because it is like a little rectangle and I had to remove one of the sides so the 4 pin connector could fit in properly. So 3 pins were connected properly and the fourth pin is not needed. As we can control the fan speed through the controller.

I am having the same problem with the BIOS update and now the loud annoying fan. Contacted Gateway support and they want me to ship (at my expense) the computer to them to fix. They believe it is a hardware failure. Has anyone shipped it in? Do they fix the problem? OR, can I flash back to the previous BIOS.

They should just make the old Bios available online, but they don't want to their customer service is pretty unpleasant.

You could install a fan controller to lower the speed of the fan down, which is what I did.

But if you are not really comfortable messing around with the insides of the computer you could ship it out to them.

If you have sent yours in, they replace just about everything on the inside of the machine and send it back. I sent mine in in October and they didn't update the bios. Started having problems again, and they instructed me to update the bios at the beginning of this month. Now, my computer won't even get through booting.

After sending it in again, I will be installing fans to keep this cool. I purchased this computer because it seemed to be a good deal and had a good CNet review. However, after having to ship it to Texas twice this year, I would have been able to buy a better computer.

Basically, once you get your computer back from their repair center, get fans installed and you should be ok.