Thinkpad T510 - Whine Noise

[waterloo]

Has anybody in Canada sent in their T510 to Lenovo Canada about the whining noise and mentioned the "special" motherboard that could help fix this issue?? If so, please reply with your experience.
Thanks!
Stephen!

[Q-Ball]

Yes, I did.
August '10: got a T510 (Optimus, i7-620M). Whined.
November '10: got a replacement motherboard (non-Optimus, i7-620M). Whined.
January '11: recieved a replacement T510 (Optimus, i5-540M). Whined.
July '11: recieved a replacement W520 (Optimus, i7-2720QM). Whined, but whines MUCH less. Quieter, too.

And that was the end of that.

(Plus, there's always a faster fan to drown the noise out because of the extra power for the i7-2720QM and Quadro 1000 GPU, and there's also ThrottleStop, a utility that can slow the processor's 'jumps' from high to low frequencies which is the cause of the problem- see Natbuk's posts here (http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-a ... 22/page/16)).


But... this isn't unique to Lenovo, as I can provide numerous other examples that whine in the same manner (not owned by me):

Acer Aspire 5743 (i3-380M)- whines, and you can hear it over its microphone (Skype calls to that laptop are not pleasant).
Panasonic Toughbook CF-73 (Pentium M)- whines
HP Compaq NC6230 (Pentium M)- whines

Macbooks/MBPs also whine (though I've never put my head to one or used one for enough time to see that).


So there's no escape from Intel's Enhanced SpeedStep problem (since that's what causes it- disabling Power Management which is SpeedStep IIRC stops the noise). Apparently AMD notebooks can also do this, but judging by the number of Google hits it seems to be less prevalent.