Thinkpads Forum

Hello guys, I bought a couple of games, some quite old like crysis (2007).
However even with no lot of details, the GPU warms up fast, then when attaining about 90o celsius, it slows down everything then the game lags for about 10s, then goes back to normal speed then repeats the cycle, which makes all the games quite unusable.
I installed EVGA Precision and saw the anormal behaviour. I would like to have some kind of control about this. Tried lowering core/memory/whatever clocks however there is no big effect. I would like to know how to force at least the FAN to be always at maximum speed, or to have speed throttling not as radical as going from say 700MHz to 200MHz (which causes lag) or what do you guys do to be able to play even with no lot of details.
Please give me tips, links or whatever information so I can play a little bit with my computer !
Thank you

I forgot, thinkpad w520 2820qm, 16gb ram, quadro 1000m, samsung ssd 830, fullhd

Search the forum for TPFanControl, particularly a custom build of it that was designed for the W520

have it installed but seems completely useless, it only reports cpu speed. every other option doesnt work (prints lot of error on the log screen). only settable setting is bios mode, the other ones fail. I dont know if there are other tools, like some for specifically the GPU, tools by nvidia or whatever ?

Heat is definitely a problem gaming on the W520.
tpfancontrol (the normal version 0.62) works fine on my W520 so you may have some other issue.
What BIOS version are you using? I stopped upgrading at v1.36 since I have DDR3-1600 memory installed.

I installed tpfancontrol 0.62 but I only see the CPU temperature. Can somebody please post everything needed to set this thing up ? !!!!! Help

kpoman wrote:I installed tpfancontrol 0.62 but I only see the CPU temperature. Can somebody please post everything needed to set this thing up ? !!!!! Help

Depends what exactly you want it to do; in my case I have it set so that it leaves the fan in BIOS control on bootup, just reporting the temp. When I want to game I open the applet and select the option to force the fanspeed to 7 (the fastest "normal" setting). If (when) the temp gets to some threshold the program will recognize it and switch to "smart" mode and the fan will go to its "emergency fast" speed. I also adjusted the settings ("edit TPFancontrol.ini" option from the programs menu) to reduce the threshold temps for the higher fan settings so that the temp doesn't get too high before the fan can bring it back down.

kpoman wrote:I installed tpfancontrol 0.62 but I only see the CPU temperature.

Me, too; I've never heard of anyone being able to configure it to show more on a W520. I used SpeedFan to get the rest of the numbers, but SpeedFan can't change the fan speed on the W520. At least between the two of them we get most of a solution.