[ltp] Overheating T500

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Fri, 14 Dec 2012, irb wrote:
> * Henrique de Moraes Holschuh (aka hmh@hmh.eng.br) used 1.7K on Fri, 14 Dec 2012 at 11:50 -0200 to say: 
> > On Fri, 14 Dec 2012, Julien Iguchi-Cartigny wrote:
> > 
> > So yes, it could very well be a kernel bug.  But it is far more likely that
> > you have a thermal interface crack, or some other manufacturing defect that
> > shows up after some use.
> 
> I've been seeing this issue too, on a T43p that's been running Slackware Linux
> for many years. Slack 14 comes with a 3.2 kernel and that's when I started
> suffering random reboots. Stock or custom kernel doesn't matter.  I've had
> some luck (!!) with removing the thermal module, but I'd be curious to know
> what changed.

I have a T43 (model 2687 I believe).  I can assure you it does NOT reboot,
it does NOT crash, and it needs absolutely ZERO help from the OS to work
heavy workloads at reasonably hot environments (it is usual for me to
working at 30°C in the shadow, both in low and high-humidity environments).
Kernels 3.0.y, 3.2.y and 3.4.y (i.e. the ones you get from kernel.org) are
all good, using Debian Squeeze and Debian Wheezy userspace. *NO* suspend to
disk, just suspend to RAM.

If your T43 is crashing, open it, clean it up throughoutly, and replace the
thermal compound on the CPU with Arctic Silver 5 or better (anything with
less performance than AS5 will NOT do): the stuff from the factory really,
REALLY doesn't survive for this long, it will have cracked for sure.

My T43 will top at 72°C during a long kernel build (rest of the box will be
at 45°C to 66°C, according to the 12 thermal sensors it has) if I leave it
to the EC standard fan control, or at 70°C if I set it to fan level 7.   It
goes down to 67°C in disengaged fan mode, the CPU is a 1.83GHz Pentium M, I
believe.

It will get hotter if I do a both GPU and CPU burn: I never got around to
modding it for enhanced GPU thermal cooling, and it has that annoying 2mm
thermal gunk pad between the long-arm thermal sink and the discrete GPU,
which really doesn't help at all.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh