Thinkpads Forum

Model: 2007-68U

I've had overheating issues with this laptop since I first got it. I recently added a 2nd 1gb memory stick, for 2gb total, and this seems to have made the problem slightly worse.

Here's what it typically looks like at room temp under normal use. Are these CPU and GPU temps considered high?



Here's what it looks like under heavy use. Notice how CPU and GPU are hotter, but the fan speed is almost unchanged. This is pretty typical - the fan is never very loud just before I get an overheating-caused lockup. CPU ~96*C is about as high as it gets before a lockup.


I just started using TPFanControl, but only using it in monitoring mode now. These tests are done with the laptop plugged in, set to max performance and at the same room temps (tests run within minutes of each other).

Is something wrong with my laptop? Why doesn't the fan speed max out before the laptop overheats?

MOD EDIT: Please add picture warning in the subject line by yourself next time. Thanks!

I think those temps are quite high, considering normal use as you stated.
The GPU is almost at its threshold and those temps are not under load I wonder what would happen if you were to pop in a graphic intense game...

edit-I just saw the pic under load. either way i think they are quite high. The fan speed it at its max in each picture.

What surface is the computer placed on?

ThinkPad wrote:edit-I just saw the pic under load. either way i think they are quite high. The fan speed it at its max in each picture.

What surface is the computer placed on?

I don't think that's the max fan speed, as there are times when the fan has been much noisier.

It's sitting on a wood desk. Plus I've got the back of the laptop propped up ~1/4" on a small aluminum block to help improve circulation.

hold smack bottom I have basically the same system as yours and mine is probably 44C for the CPU and i think it was 55 or something for the GPU.

ACtually here they are now:

CPU 44°C (0x78)
APS 35°C (0x79)
PCM 34°C (0x7a)
GPU 63°C (0x7b)
BAT 29°C (0x7c)
BAT 27°C (0x7e)
BUS 37°C (0xc0)
PCI 44°C (0xc1)
PWR 41°C (0xc2)

fan at 2900RPMs.

This is on Balanced tho but still that's aaay hot or normal usage i'd say.

SHoTTa35 wrote:hold smack bottom I have basically the same system as yours and mine is probably 44C for the CPU and i think it was 55 or something for the GPU.

fan at 2900RPMs.

How should I proceed here? Is Lenovo going to accept temps from TPFanControl, or are they going to make me send it in?

i guess i'd call Lenovo, tell them you bought a new stove so you don't need your laptop to do the cooking anymore. LOL

LOL.. just kidding... tell em it's just waaay too hot.

SHoTTa35 wrote:i guess i'd call Lenovo, tell them you bought a new stove so you don't need your laptop to do the cooking anymore.

Called them up, they want me to send the laptop in. After some searching, it seems like ~3800rpm is the max for the T60 stock fan. And mine is always running near the max. Earlier in the thread, I reported that the fan can be louder. I figured out that's because the fan makes more noise when it accelerates up to its max rpm than when it stays at the max rpm.

So I guess the fan is working fine, and the temp sensors are working fine in that they have the fan on the highest setting almost all the time. But something else in the cooling system is most definitely not working normally. I wonder if this has already shortened the life of the laptop and if I can get Lenovo to replace any adversely affected parts.

well if anything they'll probably replace the CPU and mobo (takes care of CPU) Your Memory and all that probably didn't get that hot .. your CPU and GPU is the things to be concerned about but as i said, they'l probably replace those

SHoTTa35 wrote:well if anything they'll probably replace the CPU and mobo (takes care of CPU) Your Memory and all that probably didn't get that hot .. your CPU and GPU is the things to be concerned about but as i said, they'l probably replace those

What makes you think they'll replace the CPU and MB? You think failures there are leading to the overheating problem?

Update: I noticed this post about clogged heat sinks: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=56164

I opened removed the palm rest and keyboard and cleaned out the heatsink/fan area as best I could. The dust accumulation didn't seem nearly as bad as the laptops kchung describes.

After starting it back up . . . what a difference!

Under normal use:


Under heavy use, heavier than in my first post (this level of use would certainly have overheated the laptop to lockup prior to the cleaning):


Under normal and heavy use, the CPU and GPU are 30-40*C cooler. I guess I don't have to send it in now.

Thanks kchung!

Good work and resolution.

How long have you had the PC? Unusual to get a heat sink build-up in just a couple of months.

Anyway, it's nice to get a solution. I had read Chung's thread before.....so I will also be monitoring the temps and heat sink clogging in the future.

Enjoy your PC!

Alacrity

alacrityathome wrote:Good work and resolution.

How long have you had the PC? Unusual to get a heat sink build-up in just a couple of months.

Just shy of 2 years. And I guess it's been getting worse over time, and since it's dust build-up, it's not something you notice from one day to the next or even one month to the next.

Thanks to SHoTTa35 for posting his laptop's temps - seeing far lower temps on a nearly identical configuration made it very clear that something was seriously wrong with my laptop.

serpico wrote:

alacrityathome wrote:Good work and resolution.

How long have you had the PC? Unusual to get a heat sink build-up in just a couple of months.

Just shy of 2 years. And I guess it's been getting worse over time, and since it's dust build-up, it's not something you notice from one day to the next or even one month to the next.

Thanks to SHoTTa35 for posting his laptop's temps - seeing far lower temps on a nearly identical configuration made it very clear that something was seriously wrong with my laptop.

Any link or instructions on how to do this? I mean to open the keyboard and the palm rest?

Got it:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... 63912.html

Mine has been almost a year, but no dust whatsoever. I have used this laptop on a very dirty place before.

Would it be possible that it's the fault of Lenovo manufacturing?

I have a T60 Type 2007-4CU and started to notice high heat on the bottom of the unit. I have had it for a couple years. I removed the keyboard and palm rest and used canned air to blow out the heat sinks etc. Put it back together and noticed a huge difference. The high heat is gone. the laptop feels like when I first used it. For good measure, I downloaded and installed the latest Power Mgmt driver and software. In the readme of the software, it states it fixes an issue where the CPU usage became high. The version for Power Manager is 1.60. And the ACPI Power Mgmt is 1.53. But it looks like the whole issue has to do with the heatsinks getting clogged.

also i found out on my t60p when the fan is in manual mode enter the number 64 instead of 0-7 to get 5000+ rpm's

s4mus_4r4n wrote:also i found out on my t60p when the fan is in manual mode enter the number 64 instead of 0-7 to get 5000+ rpm's

Have you checked the stability of running the fan at 5000+ rpms?

ive had it run stable at 5000+ i noticed it once when the program was accidentally on smart mode that i saw it kick in when the tep of the gpu hit 190's then i looked it up and forgot what site i found it on, then typed 64 and had it run stable

My fan runs constantly at 4700rpm when i'm putting load on the system. It averages 2500 or so otherwise.

I think the t6x series didnt take care of gpu heat properly. My machine overheats all the time. Usually around 125C is when the screen goes blank:

1 cpu 69°C
2 aps 42°C
3 crd 36°C
4 gpu 119°C
5 no5 50°C
7 bat 33°C
9 bus 50°C
10 pci 64°C
11 pwr 62°C

@OP:

Take the HSF off the machine and replace your thermal grease. I recommend Arctic Silver 5.

Then watch your temps drop even more.

First of all, before removing the fan, block the fan from spinning, once you have access to it but don't remove it. Blow compressed air from the inside out to the grills of the machine, there's a cummulative amount of dust in there.

Thermal paste should be your last choice if the air thing doesn't work.

agarza wrote:First of all, before removing the fan, block the fan from spinning, once you have access to it but don't remove it. Blow compressed air from the inside out to the grills of the machine, there's a cummulative amount of dust in there.

Thermal paste should be your last choice if the air thing doesn't work.

+1

agarza wrote:First of all, before removing the fan, block the fan from spinning, once you have access to it but don't remove it. Blow compressed air from the inside out to the grills of the machine, there's a cummulative amount of dust in there.

Thermal paste should be your last choice if the air thing doesn't work.

I'm going to disagree with you on this one.

Given the age of the system the old thermal paste is more than likely not transferring heat as efficiently as a new paste job would do. That and we are talking maybe, maybe an additional 10 minutes of labor to remove the HSF, blow it out, clean it off, re-apply a new coat of paste and re-install it in the system.

The cumulative effect of blowing out the fan and grill + re-pasting the CPU and HSF will lower temps more than just blowing out the system but leaving old paste in place.

Think of it as preventative maintenance.

It's a pretty common recommendation for people to "rejuvenate" their thermal paste once in a while.

Then again, I have a 5.5 year old desktop PC (Pentium4-HT), on which the thermal paste has not been replaced even once during that entire period (heatsink was cleaned a couple of times). The average temperature hasn't gone up even by 1 degree.

Go figure.

dr_st wrote:It's a pretty common recommendation for people to "rejuvenate" their thermal paste once in a while.

Then again, I have a 5.5 year old desktop PC (Pentium4-HT), on which the thermal paste has not been replaced even once during that entire period (heatsink was cleaned a couple of times). The average temperature hasn't gone up even by 1 degree.

Go figure.

The smoother and flatter the two mating surfaces are, the less you need to rely on the grease. Perhaps you have a very nicely lapped heat sink or perhaps it's over sized for the job at hand.

tangel: That disparity between CPU and GPU indicates to me that it may not be dust in the heatsink or bad thermal grease, although those are valid things to check.

Have you ever had your motherboard or heatsink replaced by Lenovo for any reason?

Pop the keyboard, and look at the heatsink. You might have to remove the screws holding in the GPU/northbridge clamp.

If you see this, things aren't good, and Lenovo failed miserably: http://bhtooefr.ath.cx/images/IMG_1233.jpg

Of course, the replacement heatsink had 1/8" thick thermal grease on the GPU and northbridge, as I found out when I replaced my motherboard... (It now has AS5.)

My temps on a 2.0 GHz Core Duo and V5250, with Aero and some DirectX-accelerated video running, and ~50% CPU load:

1 cpu 66°C (0x78)
2 aps 43°C (0x79)
3 crd 40°C (0x7a)
4 gpu 75°C (0x7b)
5 no5 35°C (0x7c)
7 bat 33°C (0x7e)
9 bus 49°C (0xc0)
10 pci 55°C (0xc1)
11 pwr 54°C (0xc2)

So the big hole in the heatsink was caused by overheating?

Nope, it was caused by Lenovo installing the wrong heatsink.

GPU temperatures were well over 80 C at idle on the desktop, and even the simplest 3D pushed them up over 126 C, to shutdown.

Ok I am still confused.

They installed a heatsink with a giant hole in it? Or the excessive heat caused it to fail in such a catastrophic manner.

I fail to understand where the hole came from especially if they installed it that way.

My experience and from what I have read here on the forum and from other sources the cooling system on the T60 series is very bad designed. I have never seen any T60 machine with temps that get near the levels of the T4x series , even an T42p (2.13 GHz) is in the range of cirka 40-45° C CPU temp. I have replaced the thermal paste on my T60 with AS5 and used the coin trick to put more pressure on the HSF.
But my temps even running on battery power are like around 60° C for CPU and GPU and get into the range of 80+ under heavy load.

It doesnt freeze or shut down but I think the lifespan of my T60 want come close to my T42 (over 4 years old) that my wife is using now and is going as strong as ever.

But then again you cant beat the quality of that machine IBM's top machine ever , my opinion atleast.

But glad you got your temps down to not harmful levels

Gustavo wrote:My experience and from what I have read here on the forum and from other sources the cooling system on the T60 series is very bad designed. I have never seen any T60 machine with temps that get near the levels of the T4x series , even an T42p (2.13 GHz) is in the range of cirka 40-45° C CPU temp.

I have a T42 and a T60, both with discrete graphics. The CPU temperatures seem comparable. GPU temperatures are indeed higher on the T60...

Gustavo wrote:But then again you cant beat the quality of that machine IBM's top machine ever , my opinion atleast.

With all the GPU failures of the T4x series, I think quite a few members here will vote for a T60 over a T4x, in terms of quality...