T550 overheating, Machine Check Exception and shutdown

[thermal]

I'm having trouble with lots of Machine Check Exceptions on my T550. If I run any sort of heavy numerical job, I get CPU over-temperature, and this can cause a fatal MCE and system shutdown. Has anyone else experienced this? Is this caused by bad airflow path, insufficient cooling, overlong heat-pipe, slow fan spin-up, or what? If the machine is on my lap rather than a table, the system shuts down a lot more. I already had the service rep out to rebuild it once, new CPU and board, and he says it's fine, but it still dies.

Having the machine randomly power off on me is a total killer. Here is the error:

Hardware event. This is not a software error.
MCE 1
CPU 0 THERMAL EVENT TSC 78e19b244113
TIME 1435763213 Wed Jul 1 08:06:53 2015
Processor 0 heated above trip temperature. Throttling enabled.
Please check your system cooling. Performance will be impacted
Running trigger `unknown-error-trigger'
mcelog: Too many trigger children running already
STATUS 8820080b MCGSTATUS 0
MCGCAP 1000c07 APICID 0 SOCKETID 0
CPUID Vendor Intel Family 6 Model 61

[ajkula66]

Welcome to the forum!

Return that lemon and buy a different system - not necessarily a ThinkPad - altogether.

That type of behaviour is completely unacceptable on a high-end business-grade laptop. Period.

Good luck.