Thinkpads Forum

So, I felt like upgrading my T510's cooling. Apparently most models just come with an aluminium heasink, and one of the vents is blocked off. So, I got a new copper W510 one off of ebay & made it fit. Might as well throw up the pics and results up here if anyone's curious

Here's the machine and the heatsinks


Making it fit


Final product


After this surgical procedure, my load temps are way down, but idle's still around 35-45 (BIOS fan mode). With max fan speed, my load temps were 85c, and now they're 63-ish. Gotta love Thinkpads and their hackability!

Hi there ;
Great Post ! excellent working 'upgrade'. can you give more details of vendor (links perhaps) & steps you did...please...

I have a T510 + w510 FHD's ....and was also thinking of similar wyas = to make them LONG LASTING - as msot of my thinkpads are kept for home use for looooong time. eg my t42p(15in+12v+ external displays on seats = works in our Caddy EsC'de- for traveller video/movies ) On current setup (in car) I have a small AirCon Duct suppling coooler air to the compartment where these and other elect'nic gismo's are all setup....
works fine but i prefer cooler the better.

I was planning to have the existing TP swaped to a bit faster t510 but was worried about OVERHEAT issues...

Srry for extra blurp..info > love to see some extra help
thanks in advance
Mike in London ON

Nice, I also upgraded mine with an FHD a year ago.

I searched for "w510 fan" and "t510 fan" on ebay. The seller I bought from just had one, but the 60Y4979 and 60Y5491 FRUs should work. Expect to pay from $20 to $50, there's a sale for $15 right now - http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-Thinkpad ... 542wt_1192
Look through the gallery (http://www.flickr.com/photos/77021926@N ... 523998292/) to make sure your mounting looks the same. Oh, and if you're buying used - make sure to clean it after you get it.

If you don't have a discrete GPU, that space is taken up by some other components that stick out. So the gpu heatsink needs to be hacked off in order to fit. What I did was grab a drill, fit a 1-inch cutting disk, and just cut half the GPU heatsink off. The metal's pretty soft, it takes 5-10 min tops. The heatsink fits perfectly after that.

There's a bit of a trick with replacing it, though - I strongly recommend taking off the hinges so that you can fit it easier.

Hope that helps

Very cool mod! Thanks for posting your actual real world results of before and after the mod.

+1 on this thread.

Excellent how to. My T500 doesn't get that hot but my T60 does. I wonder if there is something for that?

Tim-ANC wrote:Excellent how to. My T500 doesn't get that hot but my T60 does. I wonder if there is something for that?

Sorry for the OT but I remember one user swapping a t6x fan for a w500 one. Search the t6x board for details.

Thanks, Thorcik.

Darthshader, did you use new heat sink putty?

I am curious as to what the average (normal) core temps are on this model. I have been battling an intermittent problem for weeks now, and believe I have nailed it down to overheating. I have Core Temp running to monitor the temperatures, and before the 'fix', found the core temps in the mid-80s. Oddly, in this situation, the unit never failed or had processor errors or hangs - the only 'symptom' was a failure to power on after the unit got hot.

I opened it up, and it already had the newer copper heatsink.. however, I noticed that there was a minimal amount of thermal heat transfer compound on the GPU and CPU chips. I cleaned them off, and added a liberal coating of new compound to the chips before reinstalling the heatsink.

This seemed to have fixed my problem, and the unit has been powering on successfully for a week now. In low stress operation, like email and browsing, the temps are in the mid-30s to lower-40s, but if I run the Lenovo stress tests which increase the core loads to 95 to 98%, the temps climb to the high-60s to the mid-70s.

So, my question is: what are 'normal' core temps for this T510?

Second question: is there any way to boost up the fan speed? (I am running Windows 7). I notice there are different fan settings in the Lenovo Power Manager, however, they seem to be fixed settings depending on the power option selected.. and I have never seen any option where the fan was set to max speed. And I can't see any way (other than the fixed power level options) to manually change the fan speed settings.