Thinkpads Forum

Hello there!

I've been experiencing some heat issues with my T61 intel video system. It had a T7300 (Meron) as the original processor and didn't get much hot, but now, since I've upgraded it to the T9300 (Penryn) it often gets up to 80*C (specially when whatching videos)... First i thought maybe the TP sensor is having trouble reading the correct info (due to the Penryn Meron differences), but the air coming out from the unit was definitely way hot. What could be wrong? What if I installed a T61p heatsink? Would it fix it? I also have upgraded the Ram to a faster timing access 5-5-5-15... Don't know if this could affect the processor temp. by making it access the ram faster. And yes, I did clean the heatsink and applied new thermal compound.

Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance

1. 80 deg C is perfectly fine for a CPU these days

2. if you want to make it cooler, you can undervolt it, and you can run tpfancontrol on its maximum setting of 64 to spin your fan to the max, thus keeping your cpu cooler than what you get right now.

3. 5-5-5-15 is a standard ram timing for DDR2 at 667MHz, though I'm pretty sure most T61 shipped with 5-5-5-12 modules. I run 4-4-4-12.

I suspect the heatsink is not seated properly when you replaced the CPU. I'd take it apart and reseat. Make sure the old paste is completely removed and apply some good new thermal paste. What program are you using to monitor the temp?

While the CPU can run at that temp both of my machines that at are running T9300 are 36-40 idle and 72-75 while stressed with Prime 95. When watching video and surfing the web the temps fluctuate somewhere inbetween be nowhere near 75.

The RAM timing will not affect CPU or GPU temp. The RAM sticks are physically located to far from the CPU to significantly affect CPU temps.

I'm using Tpfan, will try to undervolt.

Vonfeffer wrote:I'm using Tpfan, will try to undervolt.

Why? I realized that under some circumstances undervolting is useful but why would you upgrade to a higher power CPU only to cripple it back to the speed of your old CPU. I still think this is a hardware install issue.

Actually it is kind of my mistake... Climate here over the past few weeks has been very very hot, and now that it has become cold again the T61 went back to it's normal working temperature, but do you think it would be worth it to install the T61p heatsink/fan ? How many degrees do you think it would go down to (actual idle is 53*C - under high usage 83*C)?

Thanks

Cigarguy wrote:
Why? I realized that under some circumstances undervolting is useful but why would you upgrade to a higher power CPU only to cripple it back to the speed of your old CPU. I still think this is a hardware install issue.

No, you got it wrong, undervolting doesnt mean that you slow down the CPU. It means that you take away the excess of voltage overhead that intel put to ensure all chips from the production line would work fine at the rated speed. Because Intel would not bother tuning each chip to its individual tolerances, it's left to the user to work it out for better results (if needed).

for me undervolting took away almost 10 deg C from what it used to be at stock VID under full load, and that is priceless. No need to upgrade heatsinks, fans, etc.

to test your CPU under load, use LinX rather than other programs (prime, orthos, etc.). LinX is intel's own testing software and by far loads the CPU more than any other programs I've seen.

What program do you use to undervolt your processor? Is it the NHC (notebook hardware control)?

throttlestop.

you can also use RMClock, but it's more cpu demanding and is not supported as of couple years now.