No way to alter FSB on Z61 (945PM chip)? What about the fan?

[314]

Two questions.

1. FSB. I did a lot of reading and the result was that there is no way to overclock or underclock the front side bus of the Z61/Z61m/z61t. I just wanted to confirm this by asking anyone else who is in the know to say this is indeed true to the best of their knowledge. On other thinkpads one can use programs like setfsb to change the PLL and fsb, but with the 945pm chipset this doesn't appear possible. By the way, before I go any further, if you are thinking of posting a reply that overclocking or underclocking is a bad thing not meant for fragile notebooks, please post it here instead of this thread, as I am a hard-core geek and in this particular life have no time for useless political discussions.

2. Fan, multiplier, etc. Lenovo's Power Manager can adjust the fan speed, but only with two options: maximize performance and balance all paramters. Likely alternatives giving more geek-friendliness include CrystalCPUID and Notebook Hardware Control, known on this board as NHC. This latter program works with most thinkpads according to posts in the R and T forums. However, I couldn't get it to work. For one thing, the thread I saw about it was really about the T series, and worse it was rather old. It was asking me to download a NHC patch for the Core2Duo which I couldn't find. I was using the latest beta of NHC. Is the patch still needed? Does NHC actually work on a Z61? If so, could somebody please provide a quick walkthrough or at the very least say keep trying as there is light at the end of the tunnel? I tried to go to the NHC forums but they are in German.

[jkahng]

1. overclocking the fsb => to my knowledge no. you wouldn't want to as this would produce even more heat. heat is a real problem with laptops as there are very limited options on improving the stock cooling.

2. fanspeed :
- tp fancontrol works with my z61m 9451 5hk so it should work with your z61t. it allows extensive tweaking of the fancontrols although not able to adjust the exact rpm.
- nhc has a new version out that doesn't need patching and supports vista. download install and study each tab.
- nhc allows undervolting in higher cpu multipliers which reduces heat. although you need to test the individual voltage/multiplier for stability, once this is done, you have a nice cool running system.

[cmarti]

314,

Pinmod maybe?