Thinkpads Forum

I just received my new X61 with Core 2 Duo T7500 2.20GHz. It seems that no matter what power setting I choose, the CPU clock stays at 2.20GHz.

At first I found it annoying that my fan keeps running all the time. I tried switching between all power settings, plug or unplugged, the fan just keep running and running...

So I downloaded and installed NHC 2.0 and it shows that my CPU is running at 2.20GHz all the time (fluctuating between 2.18 and 2.20 actually), no matter what CPU setting (dynamic switching, battery optimized, etc.) choose. I thought to myself, did Lenovo somehow disable speedstep in the BIOS? No, they did not disable it. It is enabled and still my CPU won't go below 2.18GHz even if CPU utilization is just 1%!!!

What's going on here? I am using Vista 32 bit by the way.

Okay, I did some search and found that the problem is actually that NHC does not recognize the speed change. I downloaded the latest version of CPU-Z and it shows that speedstep is working.

Now remains the other problem... why don't the fan stop spinning? I am now running the CPU at the lowest speed, with fan control set to "Balance all parameters". The whole laptop is very cool, but the fan is still spinning...

I download tpfancontrol... but it doesn't even run (does not work for Vista?)...

Another update:

It turns out that google pointed me to an older version of tpfancontrol. I downloaded the tpfancontrol from one of the links here and it works. I can now quiet down the fan.

But upon investigating, the most noisy fan is not the CPU fan, it is the second fan that is supposed to cool the palm rest. No, I didn't order a WWAN card, but my X61 does come with the second fan. When the fan spins up to the the unbearable level, I can actually notice that the sound mainly comes from the middle part of the palm rest.

I must admit that the second fan acutally does a pretty good job cooling down the palm rest. When it is spinning, my palm rest does feel noticably cooler. So I have been thinking, can we control the two fans separately? Both default setting and tpfancontrol setting seem to link the two together. I tried to disable the second fan by unplugging its power cable, but that resulted a "fan error" upon booting and it won't boot unless I plug the cable back.

Any suggestion?