[ltp] Thermal woes on Thinkpad T60p

[Roman Haefeli]

On Tue, 2009-04-28 at 07:09 -0400, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
> From: Richard Neill <rn214@hermes.cam.ac.uk>
> Subject: Re: [ltp] Thermal woes on Thinkpad T60p
> Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:34:22 +0100
> 
> > Peter Lemken wrote:
> >> Greetings,
> >> finally managed to snatch a new T60p at a reasonable price. Manufactured
> >> in 2006 but left in some obscure dealer's stock until last month I got
> >> it with full 3 year on-site service until 2012.
> >> Which I have had to use twice now, because the machine runs
> >> unstable. Playing 3d-games in Windows makes the machine freeze hard
> >> after 20 minutes or so. Sometimes, somtimes not. When it shut down, it
> >> wouldn't start Linux, unable to load the RAM-disk. Leaving it a lone for
> >> 15minutes returns everything back to normal. Sometimes the machine
> >> completely freezes, particularly when I load graphics in gimp or start
> >> google earth. However, this has only happened under Ubuntu so far, not
> >> under Mnadriva which I run on a separate partition. Tried installing new
> >> radeon drivers from git under Ubuntu, but the problem persisted.
> >> 
> > 
> > My T60p was also rather prone to crashes of this nature. So far, the
> > solution (which seems to work quite well) is:
> > 
> >  (a) update to the latest BIOS and EC firmware. This is actually quite a
> >  simple process involving burning and booting a CD-image you can download
> >  from IBM.
> > 
> >  (b) run the graphics card in VESA mode.
> >         => pity about the nice 3D-accelerated screensavers
> >         => to make scrolling fast, jump-scroll (pg_dn or space-bar)
> >            or set the wheel to 10 lines at a time.
> > 
> >  (c) Update to at least Ubuntu Hardy for modern kernel and optimal power
> >  management.
> > 
> > As for temperatures, the general principle seems to be, if it's too hot
> > to touch, you have problems!
> > 
> > Richard
> 
> I have similar problems with my T60p.  Running it hard (both cores
> running flat out for about 5 minutes) drives it into thermal overload.
> I updated the BIOS and EC a while ago and that didn't work.
> It appears to me that the BIOS fan control is buggy, as I have achieved
> thermal overload when the fan was loafing along.

another approach to make the cpu cooler _without_ losing performance is
to lower the core voltage (undervolting). on frequency scalable cpus
this means setting a seperate voltage for each frequency. in order to do
that, you need to apply the linux-phc patch to the cpufreq kernel
module. as a nice side effect, you save power and get longer battery
life. 

on my previous pentium m box, i could reduce the maximum load/highest
speed temperature from 87°C to 64°C. the idling temperature got to
somewhere between 44 and 50°C, depending on the air temperature.

on my current box, t61 pentium c2d 2.4GHz, i had troubles finding the
proper values for phc-linux, so i am using only 'a bit' optimized
values. but still, idling temperature is typically around 47°C and under
full load never exceeds 68°.

roman


		
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