Thinkpads Forum

Hi all,

I've got an x61s, with the L7500 processor. I recently cleaned out the fansink, and reapplied thermal paste on the CPU. I didn't realize there was a thermal pad over the chipset, so I just reused it with a smidgen of paste. I also didn't have the presence of mind to measure it.

My fan still won't shut up: it consistently runs at a moderate but annoying pace. According to HWMonitor everything idles at around 40deg, but the THM0 sensor (the chipset?) often spikes several degrees higher than the cpu cores.

I was thinking of replacing the thermal pad, but I don't know what thickness! I don't want to crack everything open again just to measure it. Could anyone recommend a size?

Maybe it's not even the thermal pad; maybe I didn't apply paste correctly. Or maybe the fan's just retarded. I'd really like it if the fan would stop in low usage. Any advice would be appreciated!

- Nick

I've worked on one recently (for a mate) and the thermal pad was pretty dried up, so I replaced it with a thin layer of Artic Silver 5 thermal paste instead (confirmed the heatsick was touching fully with some pre-testing) - so far knock on wood it's been fine, with the temperatures being a lot lower than they were previously.

Bear in mind though that's just my tuppence worth!

EDIT: Assuming you have a Windows OS running on your X61s, have you installed TPFC on it and if so what's the temperature levels your getting via it?

Hmm, when I was working on mine the distance in the thermal pad between the heatsink and the impression made by the chip seemed non-trivial. Maybe it wasn't so big. I didn't have guts to remove the pad and try fitting the heatsink without it; I didn't have any spare pads in case it didn't work.

I've never previously installed TPFC; it looks like it may help solve my problem! TPFC reports higher temperatures than HWMonitor. At low usage and on manual fan speed 1 things stabilize at:
1 cpu 44°C
2 aps 41°C
3 crd 41°C
4 gpu 41°C
5 no5 23°C
7 bat 23°C
9 bus 42°C
10 pci 37°C

Are those decent temperatures?

nse wrote:Hmm, when I was working on mine the distance in the thermal pad between the heatsink and the impression made by the chip seemed non-trivial. Maybe it wasn't so big. I didn't have guts to remove the pad and try fitting the heatsink without it; I didn't have any spare pads in case it didn't work.

I've never previously installed TPFC; it looks like it may help solve my problem! TPFC reports higher temperatures than HWMonitor. At low usage and on manual fan speed 1 things stabilize at:
1 cpu 44°C
2 aps 41°C
3 crd 41°C
4 gpu 41°C
5 no5 23°C
7 bat 23°C
9 bus 42°C
10 pci 37°C

Are those decent temperatures?

You can order cheap replacement thermal pads via eBay but just make sure they are the right size - there was a thread here on this forum, posted a while back, which covered it in a bit more detail from what I can remember.

To me those temperatures pretty good to me IMHO - BTW you will see them drop more when you enable the manual model for the fan but that will switch it onto full power and will be a lot louder; I occassionally have to do that on my X61 (Intel C2D T7300) ThinkPad when I'm running to many Virtual Guests on it.

Is there any consensus on whether the pads are required? I generally have heard that pads are ALWAYS inferior to paste, but it sounds like there may be a big space issue if removed e.g. when laptop is upside down or sideways.

I'm thinking of applying Arctic Silver to my heatsink but I'm unclear on whether this is worth it in realworld terms.

I actually made the mistake of throwing away the thermal pad when I cleaned the heatsink on my aunt's X60.

There's a small gap between the northbridge and the heatsink, probably less than 1mm.

I ended up using a thin sheet of aluminum (not aluminum foil) to bridge the gap, with a layer of thermal paste (Noctua NT-H1) on both sides.

That was last year. The X60 is still working fine now.

I replaced that pad with pure AS5 in mine. No issues thus far.