W500 fan never goes to full speed

[Zak]

The fan on my W500 never goes above about 3500 RPM no matter how hot it gets. Using fan control utilities, I can manually set it to full-speed, which seems to be around 5000 RPM. The machine will overheat and shut down under certain heavy loads - mostly gaming, but I've done some data processing that pegs both cores at 100% for extended periods and had the temperature exceed 90C before I switched the fan to full.

This happens on both Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows 7, and both will shut down when the temperature gets too high, as this entry from my syslog shows:

Jan 26 04:27:18 blackbox kernel: [642153.494383] Critical temperature reached (100 C), shutting down.

Is this expected behavior? Is it harmful to run the fan at 5000 RPM? Is there a way to convince it to go higher on its own?

[ausmike]

hi zak;
this article might be of some help to your issues...... Nope not very good to run till w500 forces itself to stop@100deg!!! (( fyi we had couple of out EARLY w500 machine -that has same issues ,,, and we returned it QUICK SMART for refunds ,,,,,,but they were like first few machine off the mfg line of w500) ,,,,
url = http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_control_fan_speed

[Zak]

Thanks for the link, ausmike. I'm already familiar with how to control fan speed on both Linux and Windows, and I often set the fan to full-speed manually. I think what I'm really asking is: is there a good reason not to run the fan at full speed?

I don't think this is an early model W500. It's a 4061-UN4 with a T9600 CPU.

[ausmike]

sorry ZaK...
yips pretty sure you have the FAN SENSOR issue - seems very similar to issues we had on w500 series machines - which we returned .... and got replaced with W510s

ot sure if u talk to Lenovo tech Support - they might tell you same - its NORMAL ....but w i personally beleive that when I machine get to "FORCED SHUTDOWN due to "normal usegage - yes be it heavy workload etc blah blah ,,,,its AB-NORMAL and or lack OF DESIGN ...

Seems like u doing nearly simailar work that (out team) use their W & T series laptops for....
We found it very UNUSUAL that these set of early W series machines all ehaved the same way....(( lets call it FULLY BAKED VERSION !!!:P)

sorry for this rant ,, but only way we saw past this issue = repalce with newer models - which works fine - they get a BIT WARM , never to 100C..... we often wear out SSDs faster than the rest of laptop parts!!

[Zak]

I'm a few weeks out of warranty, so I doubt I have much chance of convincing anyone to give me a W510 (if I'm wrong, please tell me how).

I'll just manually crank up the speed when I think overheating is likely. I'd rather risk wearing out a fan than excess thermal stress on the CPU or GPU.