Temperatures out of control

[bradsh]

Yesterday I was playing a game for a few hours and TPFanControl reported 84 degrees right before my screen shut off and would not turn on again without a manual reboot (This was with the fan fully spun up at 4500 RPM, manually set to maximum setting). These temps seem pretty ridiculous, and I don't really know if it's a hardware design flaw or what. I'm considering taking the machine apart and replacing the thermal paste, but I am afraid of voiding my warranty (even though I have disassembled many other laptops).

Anyone else have temperature problems while playing games with discrete graphics?

[Colonel O'Neill]

Umm... That's definitely not normal... Could you identify your ThinkPad model? It might just be that your fan vents are clogged with dust. I cleaned out an X61 which I tried to play Doom3 on (2.1GHz C2D that used to overheat and shutdown unless I underclocked it). By cleaning out the dust bunnies (it was neglected for a year or so), the temps dropped from 60C at idle to 45C at idle.

[bradsh]

It's a brand new T410

[Navck]

I want you to tell me what you were doing before it hit 84C...

[bradsh]

playing minecraft. i was just playing off battery power a minute ago and it was at 88c under bios control in tpfancontrol

[Navck]

Minecraft shouldn't be able to push your GPU temperature that high, I've used the client and webclient and it didn't push my T410 over 75C... (With thermal paste.)

Clean the vents and see if it helps, otherwise follow my guide on the thermal paste.

Right now World of Tanks pushes the T410 between 80-88C but minimizing the window drops the temperatures as the NVS3100 autoclocks down too (405MHz from 608MHz)

[bradsh]

the only thing keeping me from doing the thermal paste is that I do not have a torque screwdriver and they cost like $50 for the cheapest junky one

[Colonel O'Neill]

My T400 maxes out at 62C, but I don't have a Core i-Series, so I don't have Turbo pushing up my temperature (or my performance for that matter).

You can try using TPFanControl to turn fan speeds up to the 64 level (which doesn't sound too good for the fan), or limiting your clock speed somehow (I'm getting smooth frames on a P8700 on medium sized maps).

[Navck]

If you're a good bicycle mechanic or such... Just stay under 1-2NM, "finger tight."

... Don't do this with a giant screwdriver, get a jeweler's screwdriver and you'll generally be OK...

But I don't recommend this for legal reasons (Mainly I don't want you to tell me I told you to strip the screws!)

[Cedric]

Hi,

I've got my brand new T410s 2912W69 running Win7 Prof. 64-Bit. When I do my usual work, i.e. typical usage of office applications and no games playing, the CPU-temperature is in average at 62°C (smart mode of TPFanControl). At the time I'm writing these lines the temperature shoots up for a short time to 80°C.

Are these temperature values respectively this behavior normal?

Best
Cedric

[Navck]

Doesn't sound right. Launch resource monitor, go to the CPU tab and sort by average, tell me which applications are using the most CPU time.

[Cedric]

@Navck

Thanks for your help.

The Resource Monitor shows the following processes in order of its average CPU utilization:

avp.exe (Kaspersky Anti-Virus): 5.0 - 20.0 (changes)
iexplore.exe: 2.0 - 3.0
system interrupts: 2.0

The rest of the processes is to be constantly beneath 1.0 respectively 0.1 (except sometimes changes).

It seems, that the Anti-Virus program is the "guilty" program which causes the sometimes high CPU load.

A short addendum: The average cpu temperature is now at 50°C monitored by TPFanControl in BIOS mode.