T40p fan and heat

[apoll0]

Just got my T40p for about 4 days now. One thing I notice is that the fan is always on, but the air coming out is not too hot. However, it does heat up quite a bit when it goes into full-screen mode. Like if I play Continuum - a low resource game, or even when the screen saver is on, the air is quite hot! It contiues to be hot even after it turns off the screen after a long idle time after the screen saver has gone on. But as soon as I bring it out from the screen saver mode, everything is fine again, the air cools down. Is this normal?

[s0larian]

This is quite normal. What you can do is creating a new scheme with the battery maximiser wizzard. Make sure that you select the cpu speed ADAPTIVE when running on AC.

Sometimes it might help to select just 16bit color depth instead of 24bit, since the graphics adapter can get very hot.

Another source of heat could be the wireless minipci adapter, so turn it off when you don't use it.

[apoll0]

thanks for the advice, I will try.

yeah, i do have my wireless radio turned off when it's not in use. Even when i use my wireless, not much heat generates though..

[s0larian]

I opened my t40p to look under the palmrest and I really was surprised how hot the a/b minipci can become. It was hotter than the harddisk, so this is really a considerable source of heat.

[s0larian]

Here i found a nice post about that topic, but it's in German:

http://thinkpad-forum.de/forum/viewtopic.php?t=113

What it says:
- deinstall original ATI driver
- install ATI Omage driver: http://www.omegadrivers.net/
- install Speedswitch XP: http://www.diefer.de/speedswitchxp
- download MobileMeter for temperature control: http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley-Oakland/8259/

Just look at the images in the posting and and adjust your settings respectively. Perhaps it helps, I will give it a try.

[apoll0]

I think I've figured out what the problem is: CPU time.
I used the system performance logger to show what the average cpu time is for each screen saver. Here's the result:

3D flower box:
avg: 18
max: 28

3D flying object:
avg: 19
max: 27

3D pipes:
avg: 15
max: 22

3D text:
avg: 19
max: 27

IBM think:
avg: 100
max: 100

Tp_nala:
avg: 35
max: 45

*others are near ZERO % utilization*

The last two are screen savers provided by IBM. Looks like IBM needs a lesson on writing screen savers.

I had my system on the IBM Think screensaver, so whenever the notebook goes into screensaver mode, it heats up, even after the display turns off (because CPU is still working).

I'm not sure if this has anything to do with my ATI driver (still running under preconfigured ATI driver).