[Matt Devo]

I hope this hasn't been answered lately, I did do a quick search.
Matt: is there any way I can force the fan speed to less rotations on my HP chromebox. The fan is pretty annoying when Kodi is idle. I suspect because I use Artic Zephyr skin with animated backgrounds. (Although it's the same if I'm in the system info windows with only a single picture animating) I see the cpu usage is around 15-80/5-35 when idle, avg. cpu is probably around 40/20 temps are 59/58.

With (stock) Confluence it's 0-40/0-10, but the average is maybe around 15% (although it's all over the place), cpu speed is usually between 800mhz to 1240. Cpu temps are around 49-51 on both cores. With Confluence the fan stays at the lowest speed.

I'm using ubuntu kernel 4.1.x atm. with Kodibuntu. Although the idle cpu usage is just ridiculous, i don't really mind ..except that the fan gets pretty loud. I think I read it stays at the lowest speed until 67c, and stays at medium speed until 58c,so I guess I'm right at the edge:

With arctic zephyr it hovers around 65/66 for a little while before it hit's 67c. I guess I'd be ok with a threshold of 72c and a fallback threshold of 65c. Since the Chromebox feels pretty cool, so again, I wonder if there is any way to up the threshold of when the fan ramps up (and/or change the speeds)?

Actually I just bought an Asus CB to replace my HP (and give away the HP as xmas present for my folks), I hope it's as silent as you say it is, as it is the only reason I bought the Asus with the better cooling I'll probably stay under the thresholds.

the firmware-specified fan speeds/temp ranges can be overridden by the OS. For ubuntu, look at thermald

I currently have two issues with ASUS CB and the OpenElec running 15.2 and may downgrade to previous release

1) The fan is full on for about 5 minutes after startup and it's louder than the old xbox fans (can hear it over 10ft away)
2) When go into suspend mode the unit is powering itself off after latest release so can't start from remote

what exact OpenELEC build are you running? System->OpenELEC->About

the Linux kernel bug which causes high fan speed on resume from suspend (not cold boot) is fixed in the Intel-EGL release of OpenELEC 6.0 (and will be in future OE releases), but requires the workaround listed in the wiki for the standard OE 6.0.0 release (and all previous betas).

ensure that you have the shutdown function set to suspend as per the wiki settings. Suspend/resume work fine here with both a MCE IR remote and PS3 BT remote, but we have no idea what you are using since you haven't told us.