Thinkpads Forum

My thinkpad has i7 2760QM, temperature measured with AIDA64 (get that) shows 50 while idle, and 89 while on full - obviously with power and performance energy profile and while connected to power.

To measure get AIDA64, then click on menu Service, then choose system stability test.


Please post your temperatures for that processor, or other i7 quad core.


P.S. I'm using Arctic Cooling MX-4 paste, the best.

What ThinkPad? With what videocard? On what fan settings? What do you use for Full-load? On what ambient temperature?

jcvjcvjcvjcv wrote:What ThinkPad? With what videocard? On what fan settings? What do you use for Full-load? On what ambient temperature?

W520, Quatro 2000M, maximum fan speed and performance profile. 10 degrees outside, C. Have a quad core i7, measure. I think I told you what I use for full load - AIDA64.

Sorry, yes you did. I'll replicate on my W520 (2860QM, 1000M) and let you know.

What do you use to set the fanspeed? I used to have TPfancontrol, but I deleted it, because it caused my Thinkpad to go randomly into Hibernation. (Might be fixed with version 0.65 now, don't know)

19 degrees C ambient; max performance profile*
W520; 2860QM; 1000M

*
"System Performance" set to "maximum Turbo"
"CPU Deeper Sleep" set to "disabled"
"Optimize fan control" set to "Maximum Performance"

Idle
CPU: 38 degrees Celsius
The individual cores each report a bit higher (40/40/42/46)
2540rpm on fan
During idle clock shows 800 MHz

Load
After 45 minutes; temps have long gone flat by now (they did after 10m)
CPU: 82
Individual cores report 79/80/72/83
All +/- 1 of course
fan does a flat 3350 rpm
the tab "clocks" shows a flat 2.9 GHz, infrequently (<1/min) dropping to 2.8 GHz for a second. On the start of the test it shortly peaked at ~3.3 GHz (from graph), consistent with it's maximum 8x Turbo under 4-core load.

Strange thing is that during the System Stability test, the nVidia icon turned colored ~half a second every ~4 seconds.

Did you check the box for "Stress GPU"?
If I do, I get a clock of 2.8 GHz (infrequently 2.9) , and a CPU temp of 89 (individual cores 85/86/88/90) with a fanspeed of 3870 rpm

You should try running furmark in extreme burning mode, and one thread of Prime95.
Use the windows task manager to make Furmark and Prime95 run on one core.

Test all cores one by one, I'm quite sure you won't get that far though.

I know Furmark, I can run it basicly forever on my desktop (GTX 570), but I've no appetite to run it on my W520 which I need on a daily basis.

I've seen to go straight to 100 degrees C. on an HP Elitebook

Yea, my thermal paste Arctic MX-4 has cycled through several times already, idle temps 48C
full load (with all check boxes except hard drives) temp is 90C
ambient temp is this year's Olympic capital of the world is 15C, I opened windows

So what is going on here? I thought temps should be lower?

I disassembled the whole notebook and removed mesh from inlet openings on the bottom, plus I took apart the cooler itself and made sure it is free from dust.

Are these temps normal? How to lower them? I'd call normal temps that are low 40s at idle and low 80s at full load.

MX-4 seems to be crappy thermal paste, because before it I had a generic thermal take paste it temps didn't change after putting MX-4 on.

========================================

I do have FurMark as well, I open it, hit the burn in button, and get this at full load 67C. But that's just GPU temp.

I'll try that prime95 test as well of each core, but don't really see point to it, since AIDA64 is a fully developed commercial software and that's what I use to test computers. I'll post results for prime95 as soon as I get them.


P.S. I'm a computer technical with American education, I work in Russia, and I clean notebooks on regular basis, and these temps for me are not acceptable, I suppose I want them lower, but then again, I need to know what other people have on W520 with this CPU and GPU.

Arctic Silver 5 (AS5) will give you a little better result. This is our forum's favorite thermal paste.
See also this: http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/ ... 012/1490/5

once you have discovered that cleaning and good cooling paste only improves a hopeless situation, these are the thing you can do:

1. Disable Core parking, there is a setting in the BIOS you can disable to do this outside of the OS.
In the BIOS power management menu, I think it's called CPU power management, disable that, it'll stop CPU whining too.
It will increase idle temps, and limit the maximum turbo boost speed as all cores will be running all the time.
But it will significantly lower max temps, intel was too aggressive with their turbo boost feature and Lenovo didn't take cooling seriously.

2. Undervolt the GPU.
Use nVidia powermizer manager, to disable GPU frequency scaling, and put it in to it's medium performance mode.
Then overclock the GPU as much as you can, use nvidia inspector for that, set the video memory to default max clock.
Again increases idle temps but lower max temps, with a bit of luck, you can make the GPU faster then default, and cooler running.

3. Use an app to control the fan, and put the fan speed to max whenever you are pushing the laptop.

My W510 rarely goes above 70C after these tweaks.
With furmark and four threads of Prime95 until temps have stabilized, temps max out at 89C.

With core parking enabled my CPU can run as fast as 2.8GHz, one thread of Prime95 and furmark on just one core, will heat that core up to 92C in less then a minute and throttle the CPU before finally crashing.

Design flaw!

What's the point of that? You decrease battery runtime....

jcvjcvjcvjcv wrote:What's the point of that? You decrease battery runtime....

I didn't get my W510 for battery life, it's horrible with all power saving features enabled, and it's terrible without.

But I can push my W510 as hard as I please, and never worry about overheating or shortening it's lifespan.

That might be true for a W510, but the W520 has much better batterylife. Depending on what you easily 2.5 times that of the W510

Optimus makes a major difference, the power envelope of the CPU's is very similar.

But it doesn't really matter, why get a high performance laptop, if using that performance may end up doing harm to it?

There are more reaosns to disable power management features as well, fx. I use FL Studio and use my W510 for music streaming through ASIO.
To do this without pops and clicks, I have to attain a low DPC latency, to do that I have disabled pretty much anything that has to do with power saving, except frequency scaling.
Hyper threading has also been disabled, as it increases DPC latency dramatically.

Also, when playing games, it's good to have a system that runs at stable clocks, rather the constantly switching clocks, as that causes stutter.
The only way to make a Core i7 run at a stable clock is to disable core parking and set it to run at max speed in IBM_ECW or windows power manager.
The stabilizes framerates, but might lower it a little, to compensate, I undervolt and overclock the GPU, it runs faster then default at one step down in voltage.

All in all, I think battery life has been reduced from roughly 2 hours, to 1½ hour on a 6 cell, and seems to run faster, no waiting for cores to wake up.

NEW DEVELOPMENT

I decided to try line method of applying thermal paste, it did not have an effect, absolutely no difference between line method and spread method.

BUT

I was testing temperatures with keyboard connected but laying on the side, and with keyboard laying on the side top temps are 80 degrees C, with keyboard installed as it should be top temps are 90 - 94 degrees. Idle temps did not change with keyboard laying on the side.

INTERESTING THING

Interesting thing happens when keyboard is laying on the side, in test using AIDA64 at full load of CPU and GPU after couple of minutes at full load clock drops to 800 MHz, and temps go down to 55C -- all the while CPU load is 100%. With keyboard installed as it should, there is no such behavior. Interesting. Why?

Anyway, my pre-final conclusion is that Arctic MX-4 thermal paste that I bought here in Sochi, Russia is fake Chinese product. I am ordering an SMD rework station from the States, and will get AS5 from Amazon, and post results when I receive it.

I get the same behavior from my W51o if cooler isn't fitted right, what software are you using for monitoring temps?

Without a keyboard, my W510 doesn't go above 51C no matter what I do, no throttling.

AIDA64


My cooler is fitted right, believe me -- it is placed right, and screwed down right, everything is alright.


On your W520 Adda -- 51C is idle temps for me, do check out your CPU clock when you doing tests. I bet it is ~800 MHz, meaning, full load, but clock is minimal.

How did you apply thermal paste?

I don't have a W520 mine is a W510, but the two have most things in common.

That 51C is not idle, but full load, four threads of Prime95 and furmark, while the keyboard is removed.

I'm not too familiar with AIDA64, I use CPUID HWMonitor to measure temps.

To test if the cooler fist right, use furmark and windows task manager.
Run furmark in extreme burning mode, and use the "set affinity" feature in the task manager to select witch core furmark runs on, and test all of them one by one.

Then see if all cores reach similar maximum temperatures, if one or more cores get significantly hotter then others, then then the cooler doesn't fit right.

If you don't like to use furmark, then use one thread prime95 in stead, again you can use the task manager to select core.
This method takes longer though, but is probably safer

Just WOW, my Arctic Silver 5 paste arrived, and idle temps with it are 43 and full load at 79!!! Amazing! Turns out I was just using crappy thermal paste.

Assuming the MX-4 thermal paste is the real deal, I doubt AS5 is a significant (if any) improvement. The very best TIM varies by a few degrees. MX4 is a very good compound. Proper application of TIM and proper seating of heatsink fan is the more likely explanation of the temp improvement (back to the norm) that you are seeing.

I resitted MX4 more than couple of times, then also tried line method, dot method, and my favorite thin layer. Nada. AS5 was installed using thin layer, and it is working great. 99% the MX4 I got is counterfeit.

Did you see this thread?

http://www.thinkpads.com/forum/viewtopi ... 8&t=113619