Thinkpads Forum

My T410 has always had a CPU high pitch whine but I decided to turn off CPU Power Management in the BIOS to see if it would make any difference (after reading about it on a forum). However immediately after changing it my fan would turn on high (3500 rpm) a few seconds after it starts powering up.

Even after restoring the CPU Power Management to default (Automatic) the fan still does this and now it is always loud whereas before I almost never heard the fan. I'm really not sure what happened because I did no change any other settings (I even restored default settings on BIOS).

Now my fan is loud all the time unless I run a program to turn it down low again.

Any ideas as to why this happened and how I can fix it?

Thanks,

BIOS update might solve it. The two most recent releases have fan/thermal control changes so you might want to apply that.

But I know what you mean by the CPU whine- I had a T510 that did that all the time (the W520 I got next only does that when the battery gets low- on AC it stops- because it's a power regulation issue).


There's a program that you might try- it's called ThrottleStop.
I'm not sure if it will solve the problem but turning down clock modulation does help (but handicaps your CPU regardless) if you have the Power Management on.


By the way, are you still in warranty for the T410?

Hi Q-Ball,

Yeah updating the BIOS was one of the first things I tried after turning CPU Power Management back on and it still didn't do anything.
I downloaded TPfanControl which helped but it had to be started everytime Windows started so it would still be loud after the BIOS kicks in at boot and when shutting down.

It actually fixed itself now, after rebooting several times, shutting down, and trying different configurations in the BIOS, I got tired and I shut down and let it cool off (laptop was ~43 degrees C on boot). After it cooled to room temperature I tried turning it on again and it was back to normal. Odd thing now is that when I turn on TPfanControl and set the mode to "BIOS" (I'm assuming it means BIOS fan control mode) it says my fan speed is ~3500rpm (which is fast and loud) but I don't hear or feel anything coming from the vents.

Anyhow, it seems that might be fixed now so I'll just keep monitoring it.
My T410 has the whine but its very hard to hear. I have to turn off all other electronics (monitors/heater/humidifier/desktop) to hear it, and the laptop also has to be on battery.

I've never tried ThrottleStop but perhaps I'll give it a try.

I actually still have exactly one month on my warranty. I know I could send in my laptop for a "fix" but I've been reading that the fix doesn't quite help the noise (at least not permanently) and I have read that Lenovo customer service is terrible in Canada where I live. Since I can only hear the noise when the room is extremely quiet I'm not sure if I want to lose my laptop for a while and take the gamble to fix it.

I think they are simply loud (CPU whine and fan) and chances are there is nothing wrong with your Thinkpad.

Yeah there's actually nothing wrong with it at all. It's just that in the dead of night if I am using it I will hear it (so it isn't that big of a deal to have the cpu whine fixed as it seems inherent with the T410* generation.

However the fan does sometimes spin quite loudly and I'm not sure if it was like that before. It doesn't do that automatically once the BIOS kicks in anymore but I don't know if it has always been like this. I know it does ge quite loud when I have my T410 connected to two external monitors.

Is there a way for me to change the default fan behaviour on the BIOS?

You can change the fan behaviour indirectly by changing power/performance options.

The best way to change the fan behaviour is to use TPFancontrol.