Thinkpads Forum

I bought a T60 but its ATI x1300 GPU is always the hottest part in my system. How can I software cool it down? I do not need its power anyway. I like to both undervolt and underclock it.

NHC does not work, in the graphics section everything is grayed out.

Did you try the Catalyst Control Center installed? It should be in the system tray if you're using the IBM driver. There should be some settings in there to run the card in low power mode whether you're on battery or AC.

I have installed the Lenovo Catalyst ATI driver and activated all Powerplay options to reduce speed and increase battery life. Still the gpu idles around 78 celsius when just surfing the internet. How can I underclock and undervolt the ati gpu? I bought this notebook because I thought this is possible.

ssd_thinkpad wrote:How can I underclock and undervolt the ati gpu?

NHC does not work, in the graphics section everything is grayed out.

It seems to me that you forget questions (and answers to them) which you already asked on this forum. Kindly see your thread How To Make T60 Completely Silent (no fan, SSD) and especially this post. Apart from the answers there, GPU's can be underclocked using e.g. ATItool.

The NHC "greyed out" thing in the graphics section in discussed in the thread NHC 2 is out and more specificly in this post.

To me it sounds as if the cooling of your GPU is defective; there are several reports on this forum about members who have discovered that IBM/Lenovo forgot (!?!) to remove a thermal isolation material between the GPU and the fan/heat sink... try search the forum for yourself to learn more about that. A X1300 GPU idling in the 70+ deg. C is absolutely way too high... something surely is wrong.

PS: I assume that you run Windowes XP Pro SP2 (or SP3); you fail to let us know that...

Johan

I use Vista and updated my signature. ATI Tool is not working on T60 x1300 - its values are always instantly resetted and I get 1300 MHZ shown. The mentioned driver that can help with the grayed out nhc options is for xp. The cpu whining is disabled by not just disabling the c4 state but telling the cpu to not slightly step between c3 and c4 cpu states but rather just jumg between them, this I do with rmclock. I did not found a similar option in nhc After opening the T60 I noticed that the heat sink of the gpu is really hot which can be a good sign that the cooling system is working. The reported 78 celsius heat occurs when the gpu idles which means I shutdown the fan completely off regardeless of cpu or gpu temperature.

With the system fan on and only surfing the internet the x1300 gpu idles around 60 celsius.

Have you tried 'modding' the fan, are you using the stock thermal compound? I've used in the past AS5 on the CPU/GPU area and the temp has decreased. It's known that T60 with Flexview are hot, but I don't see why the elevated temp on your GPU, not long ago a T42p I had it idled at about 50-52C and tops 75C when playing. I removed the brown goop on the heatsink that goes to the GPU with Arctic Silver 5. IMO underclocking does not lower that dramatically the temps, maybe like 1-2 degrees off, it's better to have the best thermal dissipation possible.

I only opened the keyboard to have a quick view on both cpu and gpu heat sink. There is everything in stock. Is Arctic Silver 5 the best there is? Currently my notebook is running around 80 celsius all the time. But I want to keep this notebook because of its display. If there were not archer6 and Johan, I'd never found out that a notebook could have such a nice display. Now I want to keep it

Additionally to the utilities Johan has mentioned, I can recommend ATI Tray Tools (different from ATITool). This utility offers an amazing variety of settings to tweak, not just clocking, that have more or less some influence on gpu performance and thus heat production. Definitely worth a look

Cheers,

Marin