Is it worth replacing the fan?

[kennyschiff]

I have an x230 that I run Linux Mint on. The fan can be very loud at times. I have compressed air and blew it out the other day, with no noticeable difference. I hadn't done a BIO upgrade ever, so I just flashed the latest from Lenovo, which may have quieted this down a bunch (hard to know yet, as it's still too early)... either way, is the fan worth replacing? I saw others on the Lenovo boards who have used this http://www.aliexpress.com/item/NEW-MODE ... 76939.html for an X220.

Any feedback is appreciated.

[anarky321]

i replaced the motherboard on my x230 and from the amount of work that required I don't think it's worth the effort unless you have a failing fan

keep in mind that the problem may like in the thermal paste - look at temps with Argus Monitor and see if temps stay critical even at full blast...also monitor your CPU usage..maybe some app is keeping it high...im in no way familiar with linux so you would know better which apps monitor that

i put CLU on my cpu before putting the replacement motherboard in and it's been smooth sailing...there's also another chip that the heatsink rests on, not sure if it's the iGPU or the southbridge or northbridge or w/e but the paste on that will have to be replaced as well because the single copper pipe cools both of them

the laptop was definitely not designed with user fan replacement in mind....also the first time i put everything back together the laptop would not power up, i had to reassemble everything a second and it worked although i did everything identical to the first time

it was not a fun time....on my Alienware a fan replacement can be done in under 2 minutes...different design philosophy

[vurpo]

keep in mind that the problem may like in the thermal paste - look at temps with Argus Monitor and see if temps stay critical even at full blast...also monitor your CPU usage..maybe some app is keeping it high...im in no way familiar with linux so you would know better which apps monitor that

On Linux, the "sensors" program from the "lm-sensors" package can show you temperatures from the CPU, GPU, hard drive, basically every temperature sensor there is. On Linux Mint; install it using: "sudo apt-get install lm-sensors". Then run the command "sensors" to see fan speed and all the different temperature sensors in your computer. (some guides tell you to use "sudo sensors-detect" to detect sensors first, but this wasn'ẗ necessary on my X230)

Now, if you want to monitor and not just check once, you can use the following command: "watch -n1 sensors". This will run "sensors" every second (you can change the number to something smaller or bigger if you want to change the checking frequency). Press Ctrl-C to quit.

If you want to check processes and CPU usage, the built in "top" command is pretty much like the process list in the Task Manager in Windows. You get a list of processes, sorted by CPU usage, and you can kill processes and so on. However, there's a much better alternative called "htop" which you can install. It features mouse support, color coding, CPU usage graph with every core displayed separately, you can arrange the process list into a tree and so on.