Thinkpads Forum

I am the original owner of my T61. (7662-CTO) It appears that I am one of the very lucky people with an 07/08 date code and Rev A2 NVS 140m graphics. 4 years later it still works perfectly. Just wanted to share.

Don't want to put a damper on your spirit, but the SAFE machines have a date code 08/08 (2008/August) or later!
Your 07/08 machine is from 2007/August, critical in other words...

RealBlackStuff wrote:Don't want to put a damper on your spirit, but the SAFE machines have a date code 08/08 (2008/August) or later!
Your 07/08 machine is from 2007/August, critical in other words...

Yes, that's my point. Lenovo stated that some machines from 07/08 are safe, they just don't know which ones. I'm saying that after four years of use, mine is working perfectly. Odds are mine is one of the rare ones from 07/08 that is not defective.

No, you are reading your date wrong.
SOME good machines were available in 08/07 (which is year 2008 month 07 = July).
07/08 is a 2007 date!

RealBlackStuff wrote:No, you are reading your date wrong.
SOME good machines were available in 08/07 (which is year 2008 month 07 = July).
07/08 is a 2007 date!

Ah, that make sense. My impression was that defective GPUs were dying rather quickly. I guess I'm due any day...

I've spent literally hundreds of hours researching this problem and when I collect only the data that can be verified, it becomes clear that there is a major "luck" factor involved in effected units. I don't believe that "all" of the effected units are doomed, even today, over 4years from when these were manufactured the number of failures is extremely small worldwide. I can't see any trend to extrapolate that "all" these units will fail, but I do think it's likely that the percentages of yearly failures will increase, as more and more of these units are operated with insufficient cooling practices.

The stats from Lenovo show that the number of failed GPU units is insignificant compared to the number of other failures, such as harddrives, ram modules, hinges, etc... so I can't foresee any huge increase in this.

Basically, if you have an effected unit, you should open it up and clean it out. Clean the surface of your GPU and CPU and apply a very small amount of Artic Silver #5 thermal paste, then use TPfancontrol to monitor the temperatures and always run your fan at full speed when gaming or using graphic intense apps. In many cases this can prevent failure, but even if you do have a failure, used system boards are pretty cheap. Finding an August 2008 or newer might not be possible, but a good thoroughly tested used board at a good price could be a good option, or conversion to Intel Graphics. I do many of these and it's probably the cheapest and most reliable way to fix a failed gpu, but I don't subscribe to the theory that all nVidia boards are going to fail. No disrespect to those who believe that, but the numbers just don't support that conclusion.

How about giving us those Lenovo statistics? (of course realizing that there are lies, big lies and statistics...)
As a percentage of T61 units sold, not as a percentage of all units repaired!

Lenovo has never published any stats and is careful as to what they say publicly about this because it's such a sensitive topic, but what I'm told is that there were millions of effected units manufactured and failures from things such as harddrive issues reaching "6 digit figures", but GPU failures in the "4 digit figures". Of course there are surely some failed units that were never counted, perhaps simply just returned post-lease, or disposed of by the owner, so it's hard to say exactly what percentage has failed.

I too would love to see some solid numbers, but Lenovo isn't about to open any books on this subject that could cause them problems in the future, but I do believe what I was told is factual, that the number of failed units is small. I think the number of reports from owners in lenovo's forum supports this too. With millons sold, if they were all doomed to fail, then we would probably seen dozens if not hundreds of reports of failures each month, but for the past several months, I've seen only a dozen or two new posts from members with a new failure.

Obviously none of us can say conclusively what will happen to the millions of units currently still in service. I suspect it's very likely that some will remain in service for the foreseeable future, but I'm not discounting the possibility that the failure rate will climb, the question is how much will it climb, and how much of the increase will be caused by other factors such as poorly maintained cooling systems, and how many will be strictly just a result of faulty gpu materials.

MikeT61 wrote:I am the original owner of my T61. (7662-CTO) It appears that I am one of the very lucky people with an 07/08 date code and Rev A2 NVS 140m graphics. 4 years later it still works perfectly. Just wanted to share.

I have the same machine as you 7662 CTO and also the Rev A2. Can you show me where you read the above information. BTW my T61 has been on about 11,500 hours based on CrystalDisk Info bootup run time for my HDD and have not had a problem.

Date code is on the very same sticker that your serial number and 7-character model number are, bottom side of the laptop.

mine is from the first T61 laptops - I got it like September of 2007.

I've overclocked the GPU heavily within couple months of owning and it's been like that for over 3.5 years I think, and that's like 55% overclock or so - 625MHz core and 950MHz memory.

still runs like a champ

revision A2 GPU.

cheers

P.S. just take care of the cooling part and it'd be good I'm sure. Mine does not go past ~75 deg C on the GPU under full load of CPU + GPU overclocked as it is

Had a Nvidia 140M made in 08/08 replaced due to GPU failure. Very lightly used. Never for gaming.
Don't go by dates as my system should not fave failed if the new Nvidia board was in it.