Noisy fan - should I get a replacement fan w/out heatsink?

[Yonatan Amir]

Hi everyone,
There's countless threads about the infamous X61 fan, so I'm sure the answer is written somewhere but I could not find it... So sorry in advance if I'm causing anyone to repeat an answer.

Problem: Noisy X61 fan.
First Question:
Should I replace or apply graphite grease/powder?
I'd rather avoid any work/risk in disassembly. So the real question here is whether it is possible to apply graphite to the X61 fan, and if so, does it save any disassembly work?

Second Question:
Is it possible to replace the fan on the heatsink?
I saw there are fans as well as fan+heatsink units on ebay. Is it possible to replace only the fan? Does it mean more work/risk?

Third Question:
Should I put in a second fan?
I saw there is a second fan on some models, and someone even recommended putting one in the other models. As before, is it much work/risk putting one in?

Thanks in advance!

[dragonknight]

First question: With my experience disassembling an X61, I'll say you can apply lubricating oil to the fan without too much effort (you will just need to pop out the keyboard and the bezel, then you can drop some lubricating oil to the fan). If you just want to lower the fan noise a little bit, I think it will help. But, the main point is not just to lubricate the fan. The main objective is to make a better thermal conductivity between the CPU core with the copper heatsink. For that, you'll have to disassemble the heatsink from the mainboard to apply some thermal gease, Artic Silver 5 for example. In the X61, you'll have to remove the mainboard from the base to do that. Fortunatelly, it's not as hard as it looks like. In fact, disassembling a Thinkpad is really easy (I have experience disassembling lots of laptops lying around). You can find out instruction videos here: http://www.lenovoservicetraining.com/ion/X60/index.html The key to this is just to be careful and follow the instruction videos. The first time I disassembly a T60p, I watched the videos twice, take notes and then began my work, then everything went on OK It is really what you should do to lower the fan noise.

Third question: The second fan on X61 model is to cool down the WWAN (3G) internal card, and it comes with models which have the card only. For those models without the card, there's no need to install that second fan, and as I've read in this forum, those models that come without the WWAN card don't have the connector (power jack) to plug in the fan, so I'll say you can't install the second fan. Any way, as I understand, you intend to install the second fan to cool down the CPU in order to lower the first-fan's noise, but this second fan is to cool down the internal WWAN card, so, AFAIK you won't need to install and won't be able to

[Yonatan Amir]

Thanks dragonknight