[ltp] Kick up the Fan - R50e Fan problems

[Thomas Renninger]

Thomas Renninger wrote:
> Hi,
> 
...
> a friend has a R50e and sever fan problems.
> 
...
As far as I can say these fan/heat problems only appear in recent
kernels on a large number of Thinkpads, is that right?

He reported that tweaking the graphics card helped a lot:

Forwarded message:
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>IIRC the solution to your overheat problem is a flag
> in xorg.conf or something related to the graphics card?

Its not a solution, no. but it helps with the overheating. I can still make
the machine reach the critical temperature quite easily by running "while
true; do true; done" in a bash, but it takes 5-10 minutes now.

Also, the acpi-cpufreq module seems to be slower so the thermal management has
time to kick in faster.

> Could you please tell me the card and how to solve it
> (just curious)?

ATI FireGL mobility T2, Option "DynamicClocks" "on". This way the temperature
of the gfx card goes down from ~ 98°C to 56°C, when idling over night it goes
down to 48°C and the fan stops completely.

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I am curious about any info about that (old kernels working, graphic cards
tuning helps on Thinkpad XY, ...)

Maybe we could nail this down to some specific kernel version where some
evil patch has been commited...

Thanks,

    Thomas