X60 overheating with 7.1

[George Neville-Neil]

On Jan 11, 2009, at 02:59 , Ilya Bakulin wrote:

> On Sun, 11 Jan 2009 00:37:15 -0500
> George Neville-Neil <gnn at neville-neil.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I just got a Thinkpad X60 and have installed 7.1 STABLE on it.
>> Basically 7.1 and
>> then updated to stable as of 10 Jan.  I have one major problem and
>> that is
>> overheating.  I cannot run even a long compile without the CPU going
>> to 97C
>> and shutting down.  Trying to do something like a buildkernel with -j
>> anything other
>> than 1 also fails.
>>
>> I found this thread on stable@
>>
>> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2008-January/039452.html
>>
>> but have not found anything to address the problem.
>>
>> One change I did make was to switch from ULE to 4BSD, since the  
>> thread
>> talked
>> about going from 6.2, where 4BSD is the default, to 7.0.  This did  
>> not
>> have any
>> appreciable effect.
>>
>> The only physical change to the machine was to go from a spinning  
>> HDD,
>> to a Flash
>> based SSD (Intel 80G).  I don't think the flash drive is adding heat
>> but perhaps
>> the fact that I/O is now faster is leading to overheating?
>>
>> Thoughts or suggestions welcome.
>>
>> Best,
>> George
>>
>>
> Did you try using powerd and/or Cx states of your processor?
> There are several discussions about these things found at mobile@,  
> stable@ and many other places. For example, this thread at FreeBSD  
> forums: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=172
>
> P.S. As I know from reading list discussions, some IBM Thinkpads  
> really have problems with overheating.
> You may also read this thread, especially about your laptop model:  http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/stable/2008-01/msg00100.html
>
> And here is how Josh Paetzel managed to get rid of overheating  
> (using Lenovo T61): http://www.mail-archive.com/freebsd-stable@freebsd.org/msg96655.html
>
> Hope these links will help you.

They did, but then I found what seems to be the original issue.

Adding an 80G Intel SSD to the system was really the problem.  Even  
though I couldn't
detect any excess heat where the drive sits I thought to myself, "I  
wonder if a machine
this small is finely tuned to every component?"  So, I replace the SSD  
with a 5400 RPM
Hitachi Travelstar (160G).  Voila.  Building enlightenment and doing a  
make -j 4 buildkernel
brings the temperature only up to 71C at the very highest.  It would  
seem that speed
really does kill :-)

Best,
George

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