Thinkpads Forum

The CPU in my Lenovo T430 gets very hot, very frequently. It never overheats and shuts down or anything like that, and frankly, I'm surprised it hasn't. For the two years I've had it, pretty much every single day, the thing has spent at least 4 hours in the 90-102 degrees celsius range (either because I'm playing a game, or have one open in the background).

I can't imagine this is healthy for my CPU. I'm wondering if I can force the fans to spin faster. I know the fans are capable of spinning faster, because sometimes they do. Like, if a rogue process gets caught in an infinite loop, I'll hear the fans really spin up. I wish they would spin that fast when I was gaming, since at the speed they usually spin, my cores are hot enough to boil water.

Do you have discrete graphics? NVS 5400M generates much more heat than the CPU.

I'm in the same boat since I've got my (new to me) T430 last week; it gets so hot while gaming that I bet I could fry some eggs on it hwinfo64 reported 98C on CPU and 93C on GPU during a gaming session. I've tried to use tpfancontrol to control the fan (which I do on my T420s), unfortunately it displayed only the temps on the CPU, even I've set the the UseTWR to 1 - so I wasn't confident to use it like that. I just didn't expect it being that hot when pushed hard, at least not hotter than T420s which is slimmer.

If you iuse linux, install thinkfan and lm-sensors, then in /etc/modprobe.d/thinkfan.conf add options thinkpad_acpi fan_control=1 if it doesn't exist already and in /etc/default/thinkfan there should be a line START=yes. Afterwards, run command sudo sensors-detect and answer "yes" to everything. Later you need to check which sensors are working by find /sys/devices -type f -name "temp*_input". The output should have various /sys/devices/..., add them all in /etc/thinkfan.conf, but before them add also "sensor" so it looks like ie. "sensor /sys/devices/platform/coretemp.0/temp1_input". After everything's done, you can configure the fan however you want in /etc/thinkfan.conf

Here's everything explained very clearly: http://staff.science.uva.nl/~kholshei/thinkfan_guide/

If you use Windows, however, I don't know if such stuff is even possible.


BTW. Modern Intel CPUs are fine up to 105C, it's beyond that they are getting above safe temperature level. Your CPU should be fine for a long time even at 100C.

Thanks kony but I'm on Windows. I know that the TJUNCTION is at 105C, still I don't feel comfortable (physically and mentally) at these temperatures. 90C is my red line

When do you people start realizing that these are BUSINESS laptops, and NOT gaming machines!
Get a desktop, an XBox or something similar, if you want to play games.
Another point: ex factory all these machines come with a not very well applied, cheap thermal paste.
Open them up, clean off the gunk with 91% Isopropyl Acohol, then apply AS5 (Arctic Silver 5) properly.
Instructions here: http://www.arcticsilver.com/pdf/appmeth ... d_v1.1.pdf

I play modern games on my T430 just fine. I do get similar temperatures in games as ExpHP (up to 98C to be precise), but it doesn't really bother me much as the Ivy Bridge should be fine up to 105C (actually, it should be fine up to 125C, but 105C is considered a "safe" borderline). I did change fan settings out of curiosity and lowered max temperature to below 80C, but since the fan noise was annoying me I decided to go with default settings anyway. It was okay with headphones on, but when I used speakers the noise was too loud.

BTW. Modern CPUs aren't in danger of burning anyway, as they are set to throttle down when the temperature reaches certain load (105C in Ivy Bridge), therefore there is no way to overheat it by playing games unless the fan stops working and therefore won't cool the processor at all.

RBS - I do have a PS3 but it seems that I am a PC gamer at heart, I prefer to play on PC when possible. I use the PS3 for exclusives or as a Blu-ray player.

Neither my car is a race car, and still the coolant temperature is at 90C regardless I'm driving at 90kmph or speeding at 160kmph. You can say it's a business machine (it is, it doesn't have a powerful GPU), but after all, a game is an application, a software, and knowing what GPU this business laptop has, I don't expect play the games on FHD maxed out, I'm just complaining about the (weak, I'd say) cooling system.


Yes, I know, probably reapplying the thermal compound will help (and I have some Arctic MX-2 lying around), but it's a laborious work (not complaining, just saying )