Thinkpads Forum

My T410 is almost 5 years old and runs fine. The only thing I have noticed is that the fan has gotten noisier. I've read here that the T410 fans are problematic. My fan has not failed. The unit does not over heat and I don't get fan errors. The fan has developed a noticeable whirrrrrrr sound that is just annoying. The T410 has integrated Intel HD graphics.

Here's my question - I've looked at the T410 HMM about the fan assembly. Is it possible or even worth the time and trouble to clean & lubricate the fan without removing the entire fan assembly from the motherboard? Can the fan itself be detached from the assembly to be worked on?

There is a link to the T410's full specs in my signature.

Thanks!

It's certainly worth the time and effort to clean out any dust from the fan blades and heatsink. It's always possible that dust has built up and the unit isn't dissipating heat as efficiently, requiring the fan to run at higher speeds (and volume levels) to maintain core temperatures.

For a laptop that old, you need to check the condition of the thermal paste. It's possible that it has dried up.
Now you have a legitimate reason to remove the entire heatsink assembly.

^ Yup.

I just re-pasted mine and my temps are now much better. That being said I re-paste all my laptops at least once per year, as well as blow out all the cooling systems.

It's always worth the effort and cured my T500 whining for 2 months now...and if it comes back changing the fan is real easy to do....at least on the T500 , just search for a video on youtube for the T410

OK. You guys convinced me to go ahead & totally remove the heatsink/fan assembly. I stopped & bought some AS5 yesterday along with a couple cans of compressed air.

Getting the heatsink & fan assembly out wasn't much worse than my old T21.

There weren't just dust bunnies in the fan - I think it was a whole rabbit!

I blew out as much dust as I could and followed the directions at www.arcticsilver.com to clean & apply new AS5.

The T410 is back together (I'm typing this post on it) and running.

I'll monitor the CPU temp and see how it runs. Right now, with a YouTube video running in another browser tab, the temp is running between 37 - 45C.

nikki605 wrote:Getting the heatsink & fan assembly out wasn't much worse than my old T21.

That's interesting to hear. I just replaced the fan assembly on a T410 and while they definitely simplified the process for replacing RAM/keyboard from previous Thinkpads, I found the bezel removal/replacement to be a real PITA. Very difficult to get the tabs detached and re-attached properly for me. (I could probably use some better thin plastic prying tools) On replacement, had a heck of a time getting all the tabs to fully mate (most of which finally did after I installed the screws on the bottom tho), and one tab at the back near the fan outlet broke off and I couldn't find it. Sure hope it doesn't find its way into the fan blades at some point..

nikki605 wrote:I'll monitor the CPU temp and see how it runs. Right now, with a YouTube video running in another browser tab, the temp is running between 37 - 45C.

Also interesting. According to HWinfo32, my CPU cores are running around 38-47C generally while not very busy and a little higher when busy (CPU0 always seems to run 4-7C cooler than CPU1), but the GPU goes as high as ~80C or more when it gets busy. Since the fan seems to be coming on a lot now, I wonder if it's mostly because of the GPU temp.

This model has the Nvidia NVS 3100 discrete GPU, the fan assembly I got came with a thermal pad on the GPU portion. I wonder if I should have replaced that with thermal compound instead. Looks like that's what was on there originally.