Heat issues on the IBM/Lenovo T60 resolved

[Russell Jackson]

Josh Paetzel wrote:
> 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.
>  

Apple had the exact same issue with the Mac Books when they first came out.

I just ordered a t400 yesterday (very giddy about getting rid of my Dell Inspiron POS). 
I'm hoping it'll just work right out of the box without having to disassemble it first.

Thanks for the data point.

-- 
Russell A. Jackson <raj at csub.edu>
Network Analyst
California State University, Bakersfield

Memory fault -- brain fried