Thinkpads Forum

About a week ago some of you may remember me posting that I had taken the advice to clean out my machine, remove the heatsink and CPU, then reseal them together with some good quality thermal grease. Well, I did that, and for the most part things have been running a bit cooler, but nothing to write home about. I'm sitting here now running a constant 43 to 65% of my core duo, and my machine is heating up to where the CPU is at a constant 55 C., and FireGL 5200 is running a constant 77 C. Last week, shortly after doing the clean-up and re-grease, I was running 5 to 8 C. cooler.

I'm using several sensor readers: Speedfan 4.2 has been my mainstay for a few years now, and I've recently added TPFanControl 0.62 and Everest 5.50 (Trial) and Speccy. They say about the same thing.

What are you getting for temps under light load??

Related: Is it just me, or is Firefox 4 and memory and CPU hog??

Firefox 4 is definitely a memory and CPU hog. I used firefox for years until I switched to chrome after 4 was released. It's much faster and lighter, and installing adblock helps too.

I don't have a T60p but that seems a little warm. How thick did you spread on the thermal grease? The goal is to get it as thin as possible while maintaining a nice even coating.


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hunterman223 wrote:Firefox 4 is definitely a memory and CPU hog. I used firefox for years until I switched to chrome after 4 was released. It's much faster and lighter, and installing adblock helps too.

I don't have a T60p but that seems a little warm. How thick did you spread on the thermal grease? The goal is to get it as thin as possible while maintaining a nice even coating.

I'm hearing that about FFox from even their online community.

As for the thermal paste, I spread it as thin as I could, just enough to cover the CPU with a *very* fine layer. Spent a good ten minutes getting just right. (... he hopes.) Is it possible to cover the CPU and have it actually be *too* thin??

You did just fine then, like you said, you want it as him as possible and as long as it covers the entire CPU surface then you're okay.

Hopefully someone else with a T60p can offer some input.


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Your machine is on the warm side, but I'd guess a software root, and not a hardware one.

How many processes do you have running on a freshly booted unit?

ajkula66 wrote:Your machine is on the warm side, but I'd guess a software root, and not a hardware one.

How many processes do you have running on a freshly booted unit?

At boot I'm running 63 processes. I've pared down a number via the Services manager.

I've been trying to understand Power Manager, too. Tinkering with different set-ups to get the least heat while retaining decent performance. Any tricks you know?

Setting the CPU speed to Auto will throttle the CPU up and down based on demand. So browsing the web or typing or whatever it will throttle down and stay pretty cool, gaming or anything intensive will being it back up. It works well for me.


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hunterman223 wrote:Setting the CPU speed to Auto will throttle the CPU up and down based on demand. So browsing the web or typing or whatever it will throttle down and stay pretty cool, gaming or anything intensive will being it back up. It works well for me.

I've tried them all, Maximum, Adaptive, Low, and Lowest. I have found that even using Lowest the CPU throttles automatically ... that is, if SpeedFan is telling me the truth!! (I'm using the "Exotics" tab in SF, and it tells me my CPU is going up and down according to load. -- I interpret that to indicate that Intel's SpeedStep works independently of the Thinkpad Power Manager.)
I'm currently running TPFanControl and it's been saying that the GPU (not the CPU) is running consistently in the 65 to 75 C range, sometimes higher.

If power manager isn't controlling things like it should, i would uninstall power manager, reboot, uninstall power management driver, reboot, install power management driver, and then reinstall power manager itself.


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Regarding your original question, your CPU temperature seems normal and your GPU temperature is high, but not abnormally high. It's pretty easy to lower them both. You can use a software program such as NHC or RMclock to undervolt the CPU and lower its power usage and heat output. I believe both programs are free. You can't undervolt the GPU to my knowledge, but you can cool it significantly by replacing the thermal conductive pad that mates it to the cooling fan assembly, with a copper shim. Simply search for "shim" in this forum and you'll find a number of recent threads about the topic. It's easy to do, inexpensive, and makes a big difference in the GPU temp, both at idle but especially under load.

hunterman223 wrote:If power manager isn't controlling things like it should, i would uninstall power manager, reboot, uninstall power management driver, reboot, install power management driver, and then reinstall power manager itself.

Thanks for the tip. OK, I did that (twice for good measure, since the first go didn't work as Windows XP kept trying to update itself with some kind of Thinkpad PM file; had to uninstall the the driver and PM itself to get the XP update to go through). After the second re-install there isn't much change. I keep tinkering with the "Lowest, Low, Adaptive ... " settings and find that even when I set my CPU to "Lowest", the temps tend to raise, even without much of a load, particularly when watching "plugin container" flash clip. Oh, I did a re-install of Firefox, too. Did a clean re-install this time, only adding a few extensions and those directly from the Mozilla website, not from my backed up profile. Helps a bit but FF4 seems to have an issue with the flash "plugin container" because it sucks cpu's like there's no tomorrow.

Right now, with Thunderbird and 8 tabs of Ffox running, along with Avira and Comodo and Skype (no calls in progress), I'm at: both cores 54 C., gpu at 77 C., one bridge at 34 C and the other at 54 C., HDD at 35 C.

ThinkPadophile wrote:Regarding your original question, your CPU temperature seems normal and your GPU temperature is high, but not abnormally high. It's pretty easy to lower them both. You can use a software program such as NHC or RMclock to undervolt the CPU and lower its power usage and heat output. I believe both programs are free. You can't undervolt the GPU to my knowledge, but you can cool it significantly by replacing the thermal conductive pad that mates it to the cooling fan assembly, with a copper shim. Simply search for "shim" in this forum and you'll find a number of recent threads about the topic. It's easy to do, inexpensive, and makes a big difference in the GPU temp, both at idle but especially under load.

@Hovercraft, I would try the part about undervolting, and if that doesn't bring it down enough then do the copper shim thing. Reading on here a lot of members find that it works wonders and should have came like that from the assembly line.


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ThinkPadophile wrote:Regarding your original question, your CPU temperature seems normal and your GPU temperature is high, but not abnormally high. It's pretty easy to lower them both. You can use a software program such as NHC or RMclock to undervolt the CPU and lower its power usage and heat output. I believe both programs are free. You can't undervolt the GPU to my knowledge, but you can cool it significantly by replacing the thermal conductive pad that mates it to the cooling fan assembly, with a copper shim. Simply search for "shim" in this forum and you'll find a number of recent threads about the topic. It's easy to do, inexpensive, and makes a big difference in the GPU temp, both at idle but especially under load.

Interesting. Yes, I saw that "thermal conductive pad" when I opened up my box ten days ago; what a mess!! I don't know how much "thermal" that thing is conducting but my gpu has been running in the mid 70s (and well into the 80s, when under severe load) at least since I've been taking readings, which only started recently. I'll have to look into this.

Now, if the first/final step of disassembling that palm rest can be done smoothly ...

hunterman223 wrote: @Hovercraft, I would try the part about undervolting, and if that doesn't bring it down enough then do the copper shim thing. Reading on here a lot of members find that it works wonders and should have came like that from the assembly line.

Thanks, I'm downloading NHC as we speak, and will also check into RMclock. My main concern at this point is my GPU. It's running too hot for my taste, mid 70s then up to the mid 80s when under load. I checked the settings I had on my ATI PowerPlay, and lowered them a bit. I'm going to keep monitoring this and if I cannot get the heat down via software it looks like the shim route is the way to go.