Thinkpads Forum

Hello, it's me again! I haven't had much time to sort out my various thinkpads recently, but now that exams and such are over for a while, I am once again free to wave my hands in frustration at my collection of X-series.

This time it's the X200s* (again). I say X200s, it's actually an X200s motherboard inside an X201 chassis (basically everything except the mobo is from an X201). Once again I am confronted with weird thermal issues, to the tune of 50C idle temps (sitting on the desktop with TPFancontrol running at fan 6), and loading it up (Firefox with a couple of non-media intensive tabs, such as Gmail, and WMP) causes it to shoot up into the high 80s, although it no longer shuts off due to overheating.To compare temps, I ran ORTHOS on both it and my X200 p8600 system, and the temperature climbed to 95C in about 30 seconds, at which point coretemp sent the laptop to sleep due to overheat. The X200 meanwhile, managed 20 minutes and only managed to get up to 56C! To make matters worse, I have now discovered that I get very different temp readings depending on which program I use. For example when the laptop is sitting at the desktop with media player playing an mp3 in the background, the temperatures reported are as follows:
Program - Core 1/Core 2
HWmonitor - 83/78C
Coretemp - 89/86C
TPfancontrol - 56C (!) - This one causes problems because when the cpu is about to reach thermal cutoff, tpfancontrol thinks it's just beginning to get a bit toasty, and is usually still on fan 4 or something equally ridiculous...

I am now getting to the point where I think there may just be something wrong with the motherboard itself, since I have replaced the heatsink/thermal paste countless times (I've managed to use up nearly half a tube of thermal paste on this thing, just by reseating the heatsink so many times! ), and tried it both inside and out of the chassis. Does anyone have any other suggestions I could try before I go with my most favourite one so far - seeing how well the motherboard performs as a frisbee!

With temperature issues, the first suspect is the heatsink.

1. Heatpipe failure (have you tried other heatsinks?)
2. improper mounting resulting in poor contact.

BTW, what thermal paste are you using?

Hi, thanks for the response.

1 - No, I haven't, as for reasons unfathomable, lenovo decided to rotate the mounting screws on the standard heatsink by 90 degrees, meaning it won't fit on an 'S' motherboard. I'll try and see if I can pick up a new heatsink relatively cheaply and try that.

2 - Possible, but I doubt it, considering how many times I have reseated it to make sure (also from the spread pttern of the thermal paste it appeas to be making good contact with the whole die).

I have used both Cooler Master IC essential, and arctic MX-4. Neither seemed to make an appreciable difference to temps.

Mightyena wrote:Hi, thanks for the response.

1 - No, I haven't, as for reasons unfathomable, lenovo decided to rotate the mounting screws on the standard heatsink by 90 degrees, meaning it won't fit on an 'S' motherboard. I'll try and see if I can pick up a new heatsink relatively cheaply and try that.

2 - Possible, but I doubt it, considering how many times I have reseated it to make sure (also from the spread pttern of the thermal paste it appeas to be making good contact with the whole die).

I have used both Cooler Master IC essential, and arctic MX-4. Neither seemed to make an appreciable difference to temps.

the thermal grease brand should not matter too much. I like to get arctic silver, but others prefer other brands. no big deal. more important is that you don't use too much, you want as thin+consistent a layer as possible. and if there is not sufficient pressure between die and sink, there's a definite problem.

50dC idle is a bit high but not too weird, depending on ambient temps. but shooting to 80dC+ on load is not right at all, unless you are in e.g. Mallorca or NSW.

I believe this is not your case - but i have got one poor X201 from ebay with improperly installed NEW heatsink.
Read 1st story in my thread http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=116826.

I would try to analyse the air flow dynamics. The fan positioning and obviously the vents spacing relative to the fan will form part of this framework. Good luck it sounds like a nice little machine.

Sorry it's been ages since I replied to this post, it's been a busy week or so!

I would try to analyse the air flow dynamics. The fan positioning and obviously the vents spacing relative to the fan will form part of this framework.

This appears to happen regardless of whether the motherboard is enclosed in the chassis or lying open on my desk, so probably not do do with air flow.

I believe this is not your case - but i have got one poor X201 from ebay with improperly installed NEW heatsink.

Probably not, since I've reseated the heatsink multiple times (and made sure there were no layers/plastic etc).

but shooting to 80dC+ on load is not right at all, unless you are in e.g. Mallorca or NSW.

Definitely nowhere near as exotic! Southampton, UK, with ambient temps of around 19-21C.


Anyway, I think I've had to declare the motherboard unsalvageable, as it's now started just cutting out. It won't start at all if there's no battery installed, and if there is it will either just shut off half way through POST, or sometimes it will make it to the desktop, and just be sitting there idle, and poof. When it does this, it then won't even attempt to turn on unless you unplug the charger and plug it back in again. When it does this, the base under the CPU doesn't feel hot to the touch (and coretemp reads around the 65C mark) so this seems to be a separate issue from the overheating problem.