Problem:
Dell Studio XPS 8100 w/ i7 CPU. CPU fan idles at ~300 for 8 seconds then revs up to 3000 for two seconds. This then repeats. Happens most, but not all, boots. Seems to be caused by i8k and the bios fighting over control of the fan.
Solution was to simply blacklist the i8k kernel module. In /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
:
blacklist i8k