Thinkpads Forum

Greetings.
I have a lenovo r500 bought second hand in excellent condition.
Originally it had a T5870 @2.0 800mhz fsb and Ati hd 3470 graphics. It could handle moderate gaming at 30 fps (league of legends at high settings)

Then i had the (bad it seems) idea to uphrade the cpu to T9600 (2.8 1066), i saw big improvement like 40% better performance. 40 to 50 fps. But it started overheating after 2 hours and drop to zero fps for several minutes.

When upgrading i replaced the thermal paste on cpu and gpu with a white silicon based, but i kept the thermal pad on northbrige(?) Second time i opened cleaned and replaced again with very small dots this time and cut the thermal pad to the size of the chipset because it was larger to the size of the hs.
Same problems. Third time i opened and replaced everything with new thermal paste grey this time. Nothing better.

Im running hw monitor and gpu gets above 80 C and northbridge over 95 to 101 C cpu doesnt eve get nuch load or high temp.
I dont know whats the problem maybe not the new cpu itself but the fact that it runs at higjer voltage and fsb causes overheating to other chipsets?
I can only think of replacing back with the previous one. Any suggestions?

Welcome to the forum.
It could be that you bought a used T9600 CPU that had been hugely overclocked.
Also check that you have the correct heatsink for ATI discrete graphics: 44C0800
(Integrated graphics has 44C0799)
Check that the Northbridge thermal pad on the heatsink has the correct thickness
Sounds to me like you might also do something wrong (too much? / wrong type?) with the thermal paste.
Clean it off with something like Isopropyl Alcohol (91%) (Pharmacy or Supermarket).
Then put on Arctic Silver 5 (AS5) thermal paste as per instructions here: http://www.arcticsilver.com/pdf/appmeth ... d_v1.1.pdf

Finally, when you mount it back, put in all the screws, then take them out again and lift up the heatsink, to check on its bottom, that both CPU and GPU made full contact.
(Heatsink should have the full "shapes" of both chips in thermal paste).
If so, put it back and try again.
If not OK, the heatsink may be bent or has cracked tubes, or...

Thanks. I will reconsider the points you posted.
Though i have to exclude any hs damage as it seems in good shape.
I will reaply paste as the instructions on that pdf i will buy artic silver i guess, and new pad i guess as now i have paste instead

Also i have one more question, ive ordered thermal pads 0.5 mm is that the approxjmate distanse or j should use two of them to 1mm?
Thanks

My R500 came with the T9600 from Lenovo, but it sits on a dock 99.9% of the time and I wouldn't even know if it was overheating. I agree with the calls to check and reapply thermal paste. I might also consider changing out the fan, although I would try the paste first and see if temps come down.

If you don't yet have TPFancontrol, you can install that program to control the speed of your laptop's fan. Under BIOS settings the fan may not be spinning fast enough to cool down the heatsink.

How about undervolting the processor?

I have changed the paste with arctic silver 5 and also the pad with arctic 0.5mm i doubled that to 1mm. i followed the instructions and applied minimum paste and spread it to both chipsets. Now it may need some time to get to normal temperatures but i believe it will make a difference. I will post the results later. I also downloaded TPFan control.
thanks all

Ok after 24 hours and some heavy use the problem seems solved. The temperature difference is really huge, like 40 degrees down, so this only suggest that i was doing something completelly wrong with the thermal paste, (possibly too much). I dont think that after the break in period it will go much higher.
So problem solved

Artic Silver website says core cpu temperature should go DOWN after breakin.

But the AS5 break-in period is 200 hours!

Arctic silver 5 requires a burn in time, as previously mentioned. I personally don't use it though, since it is also electrically conductive you need to be very careful when applying it. Tunix tx-4 gives great temps without these issues.