How do I tell if I have a heat problem on a W510?

[wkirksnyder]

In the last two months I've bought two laptops, a W701 for myself and a W510 for my son. My W701 is always cool to the touch. Keeping it on my lap for hours is completely comfortable and even the air coming out the vent isn't all that hot. It's the coolest laptop I've ever owned.

Last week my son's W510 arrived. On the first day it issued a heat warning and shut itself down. Since then we've only used it on a laptop cooler and haven't gotten any more warnings. However, the case seems much warmer than my W701 and the hot air coming out of the vent makes the desk hot, even with the laptop cooler.

I know the W510 has a smaller case and heat dissipation is more difficult, but is this expected behavior? If this is fixable then I'll try to get it fixed, but if it's expected behavior I may return it and try another brand or model.

[dr_st]

Not something I would consider normal. I have seen Thinkpads running hot, but never encountered one that actually had to be used with a laptop cooler to work without shutting down.

[QFoam]

Wkirksnyder, the W700/701 has perhaps the best cooling system of any laptop, with two separate fans, one for the CPU and another for the graphics processor. It was designed for quad-core processors and mega-powerful graphics processors. Of course, it has to be a large laptop in order to hold that cooling system.

However, with other laptops in general, and I'm not talking just about Lenovo, Intel's new processors have caused a dilemma. The new processors reduce power during idle (i.e., when you're just word processing or surfing static web pages, but not doing much else), which is great. But they don't reduce power consumption when performing computationally-intensive tasks. So most of this year's Intel quad-core processors require the same amount of power at full-speed (i.e., TDP, or thermal design power) as last year's quad-core processors. And virtually all of that power is dissipated as heat, which then must be vented out of the machine by the cooling system.

But the lower idle-power requirements have tempted laptop makers to put the new quad-core processors in machines they wouldn't have dared to put them in last year. The problem then is when you start to do something computationally intensive (like playing graphics-heavy games), the laptop has a hard time getting rid of all that heat, and therefore it builds up and gets hot. The only thing to do at that point is to throttle back the processor speed, but that in part negates the purpose of having the quad-core processor in there in the first place. See the following for more details regarding this in the W510:

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/W-Series-Th ... d-p/211509

(The same thing goes for this year's graphics processors, so the CPUs aren't the only processor causing this problem.)

So, frankly, this year is not the best year to buy a new 15" laptop, if you want a quad-core processor in it. I haven't looked it up, but Intel may go to smaller "design rules" next year for their processors (i.e., smaller circuits inside the processors), which means more processing power per watt of consumed electrical power. They're about due for such a change. Then quad-core processors will fit much more comfortably with the cooling systems available in 15" machines.

So you're likely to run into the same problem right now with many 15" laptops containing quad-core processors. It is possible that your son's machine has a poorly-mounted heatsink on the CPU or graphics processor, although as you see from the above thread (and several others), you're not the only person running into the problem you describe.

[Greg Gebhardt]

I use my W510 in my lap all the time and it does get warm but not hot. I can't even hear my fan. I would say there might be something wrong if it is that hot and you got a error message about the temp.

[hoplite]

It sounds like a problem. I have a w510 and it runs on average 10C-15C cooler than my t60s. Under full load I haven't been able to get the CPU/GPU temps over 85C.

[wkirksnyder]

Thank you all for your help. I also called Lenovo support for advice and spoke to a few friends. The responses are all over the map, but here's my take on it:

The W510 seems to run without too much heat until we do something computationally intense. In my son's case that means video games. As much as I'd like to, it's unrealistic for me to say he can't play video games on the computer we got him for college, so I need some compromise. I don't think there is a better 15 inch choice and I think a bigger computer is too inconvenient to lug around campus. But I think I *can* say no video games unless the computer is on the laptop cooler.

I did buy the ADP warranty, so if he manages to cook it in spite of this policy I'll rely on that to cover the repair. For what it's worth, a couple of years ago I got a T61 hot enough running Adobe Premiere to complain that I was damaging the battery, and a friend tells me his son managed to melt parts of an Alienware notebook playing video games, so I don't think there is a completely acceptable answer to this. I guess certain things should really only be done on a desktop computer.

[Dummvogel]

I do a lot of gaming on my T61p. Doing it with no modifications to Windows gets me 89°C and throttling on the CPU. But there are ways to mitigate this.
First you can use TPFancontrol to put the fan to mode 64, when it gets hot. This mode puts the fan to about 5000 rpm and it is never used by the BIOS itself, so it will make a difference. Also this tool will tell you the temperature of the CPU and GPU.

Second you could undervolt the CPU in the highest multiplier. I undervolted my T7700 1.25V. I use RMClock for this.

With these two mods I get 75°C while under heavy load for hours(Dragon Age Origins or Splinter Cell Conviction).