Thinkpad Fan Noise Problem: Light at the End of the Tunnel

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Pascal_TTH · #661 Post by **Pascal_TTH** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 11:49 am

[censored], your Core 2 Duo must never reach so high temp ! I thing your T60p got an known issue : the fan assembly have been installed with removing the plastic cover sheet. This happened to some people since Thinkpad are made in china...

jigsjdg · #662 Post by **jigsjdg** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 12:13 pm

Pascal_TTH wrote:[censored], your Core 2 Duo must never reach so high temp ! I thing your T60p got an known issue : the fan assembly have been installed with removing the plastic cover sheet. This happened to some people since Thinkpad are made in china...

Okay.... so what would you rekon be the best next step? Claim warranty maybe? Or tinker with it myself? I can open a Thinkpad, but don't know what it is supposed to look like on the inside...

And what do you mean exactly: the plastic cover sheet was removed (when it shouldn't) or it wasn't removed (when it should have been)?

Thx!!!

Update: Dang... it just happened again; playing Second Life for approx. 45 minutes and the TP just switched off completely. The fan outlet on the left side felt like a hair dryer so hot. Guess the ACPI settings for NHC didn't do the trick, though the fan blew quite loud (guess ~3800 rpm).

Pascal_TTH · #663 Post by **Pascal_TTH** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 6:16 pm

If you do some search, you will find that the fan assembly have thermal grease already apply and protected by plastic film. This film have to be removed before install of the fan assembly (whatever during the manufacturing of the laptop or if you/sav change the fan assembly).

If this plastic film stays on, it act like a thermal insulating. I think you have this issue. Two ways :
- You are very common with laptop hardware, you dismantle the laptop until you get the fan assembly. Remove the film and build it back.
- You phone lenovo and tell your laptop turn of during application. Ask them to fix.

PS : I don't know if the plastic film is visible only when you remove keyboard.

cathfaern · #664 Post by **cathfaern** » Wed Sep 26, 2007 3:22 am

I tried it on my z61m, it works great without any error

jigsjdg · #665 Post by **jigsjdg** » Mon Oct 01, 2007 1:41 pm

I think that Troubadix might have had a point that undervolting was the way to go...

I have had the same problems I had before with the heat and the fan not being able to get the heat out properly. The ACPI settings for NHC worked, albeit only just a little.

Having read up on undervolting I found out that it isn't dangerous to try (nothing can be damaged; the worst thing that can happen is that your system becomes unstable and crashes. Reboot and restoring the voltage settings then solves it again).

It also doesn't reduce the clock speed, but it does reduce the amount of heat being produced by the cores. I know have set the voltage for the upper three multiplier levels in NHC to the same voltage (1.2125V) as for multiplier 11.

When I now run CPU hungry apps like Second Life, the heat builds up to some 82°C ; still hot, but not much of a problem as it is well within crash levels. It could very well be that the Voltage can be reduced even to some 0.9V (as in level 6x) and still run stable, but I'm okay for now I guess. I'm sure going to try to get my hands on more info on undervolting to see what it does and if I can reduced the heat even more (in a save way).

Guess if this works for me, it'll work for anyone with noisy fans too as they can run slower because the CPU is not as hot.

troubadix · #666 Post by **troubadix** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 2:08 am

Hi!

Back in town I made v0.25 final, see signature. Besides older bugfixes doubleclick on icon will open or close main window, no more option to stop program in icon menue for the service has be stopped/restarted by tpfcstop/tpfcstart. Icon menue item stopped programm but kept the service running. Missing config file is detected.

old v0.24 is still available:

http://staff-www.uni-marburg.de/~schmit ... v_v024.zip

Ciao, troubadix

Larus · #667 Post by **Larus** » Sun Oct 07, 2007 11:36 am

I wonder if any kind of manual fan control works on new Thinkpads R61. Did anyone try it ?

Greetings from Poland
David vel Larus

Pascal_TTH · #668 Post by **Pascal_TTH** » Mon Oct 08, 2007 3:59 pm

troubadix wrote:Hi!

Back in town I made v0.25 final, see signature. Besides older bugfixes doubleclick on icon will open or close main window, no more option to stop program in icon menue for the service has be stopped/restarted by tpfcstop/tpfcstart. Icon menue item stopped programm but kept the service running. Missing config file is detected.

old v0.24 is still available:

http://staff-www.uni-marburg.de/~schmit ... v_v024.zip

Ciao, troubadix

Hi troubadix,

Nice to read about you ! I hope your *away* month was fine. I download the final version right now.

Pascal_TTH · #669 Post by **Pascal_TTH** » Mon Oct 08, 2007 4:01 pm

Larus wrote:I wonder if any kind of manual fan control works on new Thinkpads R61. Did anyone try it ?

Greetings from Poland
David vel Larus

I works fine with my Thinkpad R61 89185QG.

troubadix · #670 Post by **troubadix** » Mon Oct 08, 2007 4:24 pm

@Pascal_TTH:

Yeah, it was a pleasure sailing the turkey coast at Fethiye.

But now I am thinking of a version of tpfc service displaying the temperature on systray icon

Keep on testing!

Ciao, troubadix

Pascal_TTH · #671 Post by **Pascal_TTH** » Mon Oct 08, 2007 6:09 pm

troubadix wrote:@Pascal_TTH:

Yeah, it was a pleasure sailing the turkey coast at Fethiye.

But now I am thinking of a version of tpfc service displaying the temperature on systray icon

Keep on testing!

Ciao, troubadix

Here, we only got rain and everything but the sunny weather.
I will give you all the possible feadback and support !

BTW, there were a very nice offre in France for a R61 (Santa Rosa, Quadro NVS 140m, 15,4" 1680x1050, FPR, 120 Go) for 849 €. The ref was 8918 (5QG). A very nice Thinkpad ! If you see this offer in Germany, you can recommend this laptop to any one.

Xtal · #672 Post by **Xtal** » Fri Oct 12, 2007 10:27 am

I downloaded v0.25 and it works great under Vista on my X61 Tablet. Thanks for the great utility.

The only problem is, there is no tray icon or window visible. I believe this is due to Vista's isolation of services into Session 0.

Is it possible to make the GUI visible in Vista?

troubadix · #673 Post by **troubadix** » Fri Oct 12, 2007 1:25 pm

Xtal wrote:Is it possible to make the GUI visible in Vista?

it is

1. rewrite the tool split into service and controlling program (GUI)

...may be next year I'll do

or

2. http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=263925

ciao, troubadix

StarSheep · #674 Post by **StarSheep** » Sun Oct 14, 2007 5:16 pm

Hi Troubadix,

thanks for the new version from me too.

Quick question about the T61p I am testing right now.

It seems to me that the fan is not going on a high setting with my machine. I have a T60p to compare it too and the fan goes much higher there.
Thats why I think the TP overheats. I was playing Half Life 2 Episode 2 and after some time the machine just chrashes with a blue screen and mentioning a nv4dsp.dll file I think and then reboots.
As the fan speed at that time is pretty low actually I think it may be overheating.
So my question, do you maybe have some temp settings that I could try out with a t61p any experience?

Thanks a lot
StarSheep

troubadix · #675 Post by **troubadix** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 3:01 am

@StarSheep:

Hi! Sorry, I've really got no experience with T61p, but:

if you search the web for "nv4dsp.dll" combined with "bluescreen" or "bluescreen of death" or "bsod" you will find this prob as quite common

It is said that it could be a driver problem, so update:
http://www.nvidia.de/Download/index.aspx?lang=de

but there might be other reasons why: memory faults and high temp of the gpu.

If you run WinXP and switch tpfc to manual and set fan to 64 there should be more than 5000rpm of fan speed. If this can't keep the temps of gpu below 100°C there should be some hardware fault, as unremoved foil on thermal pad or defective fan.

Good luck, ciao, troubadix

Pascal_TTH · #676 Post by **Pascal_TTH** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 7:34 am

StarSheep wrote:Hi Troubadix,

thanks for the new version from me too.

Quick question about the T61p I am testing right now.

It seems to me that the fan is not going on a high setting with my machine. I have a T60p to compare it too and the fan goes much higher there.
Thats why I think the TP overheats. I was playing Half Life 2 Episode 2 and after some time the machine just chrashes with a blue screen and mentioning a nv4dsp.dll file I think and then reboots.
As the fan speed at that time is pretty low actually I think it may be overheating.
So my question, do you maybe have some temp settings that I could try out with a t61p any experience?

Thanks a lot
StarSheep

This is not due to Thinkpad Fancontrol nor to overheat. Lenovo driver for Quadro are out of date (june) and crash with most game. I have a lot of issue with a T61 (none "p") but it shares the same driver for Quadro NVS 140m. NVdisp issue is very common with Oblivion, HL², M3 Challange, ... All game I run crash after short or long time.

I download the last driver from nvidia and mod them to mobile. No more issue ! Except one : after the boot, OSD shows the volume. I don't care about.

StarSheep · #677 Post by **StarSheep** » Tue Oct 16, 2007 4:31 am

Hi

thanks for the answer, although I already upgraded the drivers to the ones from http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/ and I am still having the crashes.

Any idea to other drivers I could change to or is it really a HL2 problem cause I actually played UT3 Demo for some time with no crashes at all.

Thanks
StarSheep

troubadix · #678 Post by **troubadix** » Thu Nov 08, 2007 5:53 pm

troubadix wrote:...now I am thinking of a version of tpfc service displaying the temperature on systray icon Keep on testing!

http://staff-www.uni-marburg.de/~schmit ... 26beta.zip

celsius only till now.

Ciao, troubadix (just to get 200.000 views of this tread

)

chroust · #679 Post by **chroust** » Tue Nov 13, 2007 3:19 pm

hi guys,
I just bought my first Lenovo, it's really nice I like it very much, but have this problem with GPU fan, it runs almost all the time and (I think) noisy. Speedfan is not detecting any fans and after some googling I found tpfancontrol.

I have some (lame) questions and I didnt find answers here so ...
1) can tpfancontrol reduce/control the GPU fan speed?
2) is it working on R61 with WVBus? because if I run fancontrol_service.exe or tpfcstart.lnk nothing happens no window appears. I read first post and did as it says

pls can anyone help me to get this work? even via PM, just few tips

sorry for my english and greetings from Czech Republic

troubadix · #680 Post by **troubadix** » Tue Nov 13, 2007 5:16 pm

chroust wrote: I read first post and did as it says

The times they are changing

double click "install.bat"

chroust · #681 Post by **chroust** » Wed Nov 14, 2007 2:35 am

i tried it and get two results:
1) if I run install.bat I get "Could not open Service Control Manager, error code 5: Acces Denied" window
2) if I run install.bat as admin it starts copying many files to c:\tpfancontrol\ (I stopped it when the folder had almost 500mb

)

Xtal · #682 Post by **Xtal** » Wed Nov 14, 2007 2:50 am

chroust wrote:i tried it and get two results:
1) if I run install.bat I get "Could not open Service Control Manager, error code 5: Acces Denied" window
2) if I run install.bat as admin it starts copying many files to c:\tpfancontrol\ (I stopped it when the folder had almost 500mb )

The same thing happened to me in Vista. For some reason it copies the contents of the c:\windows\system32 directory to c:\tpfancontrol.

To get around this do the following:

open start menu
type cmd
right click on cmd.exe and select "run as administrator"
navigate to the directory you downloaded the tpfancontrol files to
type install

voila, the proper files will be copied to c:\tpfancontrol and the service will be installed.

Xtal · #683 Post by **Xtal** » Wed Nov 14, 2007 2:51 am

by the way you should clean out the 500 mb of files from c:\tpfancontrol prior to running install.bat .

In Vista the GUI for tpfancontrol will be invisible - there will be no visual indication that tpfancontrol is running. If you want to start/stop the service or see if it's running, open the start menu and type Services (or services.msc), open it, and scroll to TPFanControl. Normally you will want it to be Status: Started and Startup Type: Automatic.

chroust · #684 Post by **chroust** » Wed Nov 14, 2007 3:23 am

thx very much Xtal it did the job
but I am little confused, without GUI I know nothing about what's going on there and I am not interested about CPU fan, it's fine I need to control GPU fan. And there is nothing in fancontrol.ini about GPU.

Paul Unger · #685 Post by **Paul Unger** » Wed Nov 14, 2007 9:53 am

I don't know anything about R51 hardware architecture, but on my T42 with the SXGA+ screen (and 64MB of dedicated video memory), the "long" fan does double duty, cooling both CPU and GPU. The one with the XGA screen (and shared video memory?) has a "short" fan that performs all cooling duties (quite ably, I should add). Pictures here. I've never heard of a 'modern era' thinkpad with two cooling fans, but I'm willing to be corrected by someone on this . . .

The beauty of troubadix's tpfancontrol is that it takes the highest monitored temperature (CPU, GPU, battery, etc.) and compares it to the table in the fancontrol.ini file--the one where you set the fan speeds for certain temperatures. On my T42s the GPU is almost always the controlling factor, that is, its temperature is generally higher than the others. So the "long and short" of it is (sorry, had to get that in there): tpfancontrol takes care of GPU cooling.

troubadix · #686 Post by **troubadix** » Wed Nov 14, 2007 10:31 am

Paul Unger is right: there is no gpu fan in a R61

ThinkPad® R61, R61e, and R61i (15.4-inch widescreen)Hardware Maintenance Manual:
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/pc/pccbbs/mo ... 549_01.pdf

may be you are talking about the HDD noise

ciao, troubadix

chroust · #687 Post by **chroust** » Wed Nov 14, 2007 11:01 am

thanks guys, so now I am going to try tpfancontrol for sure. i'll post my results

btw thx for manual, I was looking for it

edit: pls can someone with R61/T61 post or send me his .ini file, so I can compare my settings with someone who knows it better then I

Xtal · #688 Post by **Xtal** » Wed Nov 14, 2007 11:23 am

If you want to see what the program is doing you can set Log2File=1 and read the log file - useful for testing your temperature values.

The default .ini included with tpfancontrol will work fine for most configurations.

chroust · #689 Post by **chroust** » Wed Nov 14, 2007 12:34 pm

here I am, again
so I run a few tests (orthos, watching 1080p movie, etc). with 10min Orthos stress test cpu max. temp. was 68.9°C. GPU is 55-60°C. so my settings is these:
Level=55 0
Level=66 3
Level=71 6
Level=76 128 //if I understand right, this will turn off tpfc and let bios control fan until the 71°C is reached
I think it's fine, but I've noticed that there are no levels 1&2. if i use "Level=60 1" the fan goes level 3 and it could be fine to run level 1 betwen 55-60°C

Xtal · #690 Post by **Xtal** » Wed Nov 14, 2007 1:17 pm

chroust wrote:here I am, again
so I run a few tests (orthos, watching 1080p movie, etc). with 10min Orthos stress test cpu max. temp. was 68.9°C. GPU is 55-60°C. so my settings is these:
Level=55 0
Level=66 3
Level=71 6
Level=76 128 //if I understand right, this will turn off tpfc and let bios control fan until the 71°C is reached
I think it's fine, but I've noticed that there are no levels 1&2. if i use "Level=60 1" the fan goes level 3 and it could be fine to run level 1 betwen 55-60°C

The possible fan speeds are usually like so:
0, 1=2, 3=4, 5=6=7

Here are my settings on an X61 Tablet:
Level=50 0
Level=55 2
Level=60 4
Level=65 4
Level=70 6

I don't bother with the level 64 or 128 because it seems to work fine without it (knock on wood)

Thinkpad Fan Noise Problem: Light at the End of the Tunnel

Fan control on IBM R61

Re: Fan control on IBM R61

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