[ltp] Renewing thermal paste on an X200

[Karsten König]

Hi,

I renewed the thermal paste on my T400 3 months ago as it kept switching 
of in panic after starting windows xp in a virtual machine due to 
overheating.

On 07/13/2012 10:22 AM, Jochen Spieker wrote:
> Hi,
>
> My X200 with a P8600 Core2Duo is now over three years old and it has
> started to become quite hot when under heavy load (cores max out at a
> little over 90°C, the whole bottom becomes unpleasantly hot). At the
> same time, the air flowing out appears to be cooler than when the system
> was new.
>
> The obvious thing to do is to disassemble the system, clean off the dust and
> re-apply thermal grease (after removing the old one, of course).  I took
> a look at the Hardware Maintenance Manual[1, PDF page 112]. It reads:
>
> | Before you attach the fan assembly to the computer, apply thermal grease, at an
> | amount of 0.2 grams, on the part marked 'a' as in the following figure.  Either
> | too much or too less application of grease can cause a thermal problem due to
> | imperfect contact with a component. You need to peel the thin film off from the
> | rubber 'b'.
>
> What is this "thin film [on] the rubber"? Does this only refer to new
> fan assemblies? Can I just ignore that part when cleaning the system or
> should I buy a new thermal pad or something? Or is one of the parts for
> the CPU and the other for the GPU and I need to renew the grease/pad on
> both parts? Where would I get a thermal pad with the correct dimensions?

In the T400 with external graphics card on both CPU and GPU had been 
thermal grease, the chipset for the cpu (north/south, don't remember 
which) was attached with a thermal pad. The thermal grease was depleted 
on one side of the cpu, the fan assembly actually changed color on this 
spot, looks like it became pretty hot.

As the overheating was from the cpu I just cleaned and greased both gpu 
and cpu to be sure and left the thermal pad for the chipset in place.

Afterwards cpu temperatures returned to normal levels, my vms run just 
fine now, so it was a full success.

> I appreciate any advice or reports of experience with this. I am not
> afraid to disassemble the hardware, but for obvious reasons I don't
> intend to experiment with the thermal management.
>
> TIA
> J.
>
> [1] http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/43y6632_03.pdf
>

Cheers,
Karsten