Heat issues on the IBM/Lenovo T60 resolved

[Josh Paetzel]

I've been relatively happy with my T60, with the exception of the heat issues 
it's had since day one.  The fan would run full out pretty much all the time, 
and it would frequently reach 99-100C when doing anything cpu intensive, 
regardless of OS.  If there was any obstruction to the air vents it would 
shutdown due to overheating.

It turns out this is not an uncommon problem with the T60/T61, people either 
complain of them being loud, or too hot, or sometimes both.

After going down the road of OS tweaks and BIOS flashes I started burning up 
phone lines at Lenovo, and I was finally able to talk to someone who said 
they had some assembly problems that resulted in far too much thermal paste 
being applied to the cpu and heatsink.

So, I disassembled my laptop, and sure enough, the thermal paste was applied 
much like a 3 year old applies grape jelly to a sandwich.  I cleaned the 
heatsink, cpu, and gpu and applied some generic thermal paste I found at Best 
Buy.  (caveat:  The GPU uses a thermal pad that accomodates cooling the 
memory chips, which are at a different height.  I cut out the area where the 
GPU makes contact and used thermal paste there, leaving the rest of the 
thermal pad in place to contact the ram)

Upon reassembly I loaded up both cores with make buildworld and cpuburn, and 
initially feared I had damaged the fan speed sensor, as FreeBSD reported 0 
rpm.  The cpu temps very slowly climbed to 60C, where the fan spun up to a 
nearly inaudible 2000 rpm

If I leave it at full CPU utilization the fan will eventually spin up to 
3000rpm, and temps stabilize at 66-69C.  Under normal use the fan rarely 
runs, a welcome change from it running full out all the time, especially on 
battery.  

I have a friend that was having similar problems with his T61, and has had 
similar success after reapplying the thermal paste.

Fow what it's worth, Lenovo said the issue was covered under warranty, I just 
disn't feel like going through the hassle of shipping the laptop to them.
 
-- 
Thanks,

Josh Paetzel

PGP: 8A48 EF36 5E9F 4EDA 5A8C 11B4 26F9 01F1 27AF AECB
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