Thinkpad 600 fan question

[Franchute13]

Hi.

I bought a second-hand Thinkpad 600 Pentium ii.

The machine works fine. When turning on, after a few minutes, the fan turns on and does not turn off.
Looking at the service manual, I see that it has a FAN with heatsink. The manual does not mention the use of grease between the heatsink and the cpu. Anyone know if you need grease?

Thnk

[RealBlackStuff]

Yes, you need a decent thermal paste (like Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut or Noctua NT-H1 or Arctic Cooling MX-4) between CPU and heatsink.

[kfzhu1229]

I believe these older models simply use thermal pads instead. Replacing it with paste means you need a copper shim of the right height and then slam thermal paste on both sides.
That said I don't know if you will see any measurable difference because the real thermal bottleneck on these come from the heat spreader with its crappy thermal epoxy, which is permanent and removing it kills the CPU.
My ThinkPad 600 has fan behaving differently on what OS its running. In Windows 2000 and xp, the fan rarely spins up, whereas under dos or win98, the fan spins up exactly like what you described.
Updating the bios also changes the fan curve on these as before the bios update the fan won't spin at all in 2000 or xp

[Franchute13]

Hi.
Thanks for her responses.

kfzhu1229
Then I will not modify anything. My description was using Windows 98 and if you have the same behavior on your TP 600 it means we are fine

[kfzhu1229]

If you are concerned, you can try updating the BIOS to the latest version and see if the BIOS now has better fan controls in Windows 98.
You see, all MMC card CPU's like the one in the regular 600 don't really exhibit enough heat for the fan to actually be required to spin, but they have fans in them anyway in case future ones would (which never happened as Intel moved to MMC-2 cards which are totally different).