The fan roars only during video calls
Why does my laptop fan get loud specifically during video calls?
Written by The CommonFixes team · fact checked by CommonFixes review desk
Last updated
Short answer
A video call is one of the heaviest everyday tasks: it encodes your camera, decodes everyone else's video, runs background blur or noise removal, and often does all of it in software inside a browser. That is a sustained full load, so the fan runs at full speed to keep up. The quickest thing to try first: turn off background blur and effects — Blur and virtual backgrounds are the single biggest cost in Teams, Zoom and Meet. Switching them off usually drops the fan straight away. Most people are done in about 15 minutes.
Full walkthrough below: 6 steps for Windows and Mac, rated easy.
Sounds like this
- •Quiet all day until a meeting starts
- •The noise carries into the call
- •It settles a minute after the call ends
Why it happens
A video call is one of the heaviest everyday tasks: it encodes your camera, decodes everyone else's video, runs background blur or noise removal, and often does all of it in software inside a browser. That is a sustained full load, so the fan runs at full speed to keep up.
Work through these in order
0% done- 1
Turn off background blur and effects
Blur and virtual backgrounds are the single biggest cost in Teams, Zoom and Meet. Switching them off usually drops the fan straight away.
- 2
Use the desktop app instead of the browser tab
Desktop apps use the hardware video engine; browsers often fall back to software encoding. Install the Zoom or Teams app rather than joining from a tab.
- 3
Enable hardware acceleration in the app
Zoom: Settings, Video, Advanced, set hardware acceleration for video receiving and sending to Auto. Teams: Settings, do not tick 'Disable GPU hardware acceleration'. This moves work off the processor.
- 4
Send a lower resolution
Switch off HD sending in Zoom's video settings. Sending 1080p makes your laptop encode four times the data of 720p for no visible benefit in a small meeting window.
- 5
Close the other heavy things running alongside
Chrome with thirty tabs, OneDrive syncing and Outlook indexing all compete during the call. Close what you do not need and pause OneDrive for an hour.
- 6
Improve the airflow before the meeting
Put the laptop on a hard surface with the rear raised a couple of centimetres, and vacuum the vents. A partly blocked vent turns a normal call load into a screaming fan.
If none of that worked
Set Power mode to Balanced and, in advanced power settings, cap the maximum processor state at 95 percent. It removes the last, loudest few percent of fan speed with almost no impact on call quality.
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Who wrote this and how we checked it
The CommonFixes team
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We are a small group of people who spend our days repairing laptops and desktops for family, friends and small offices. Every guide here starts with a problem someone actually brought to us, and we only write down the steps that put the machine right.
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CommonFixes review desk
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This guide was last updated on 10 August 2026. If a step no longer matches what you see on screen, tell us on the contact page and we will test it again.
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