T60p Heat Issues from GPU and CPU with external monitor — UPDATED
UPDATE — 5/30/08
I had started to suspect physical causes for the heat because I don’t remember it ever getting quite so hot before so I popped off the keyboard and wrist rest and used compressed air to blow out the fan which dislodged a bit of dust and dirt (not a lot though). But that has clearly made a significant difference. My laptop is now running easily 15 degrees cooler than before and I can run it with the external monitor and docked without locking up. I am in the habit of cleaning out desktop computers periodically, but clearly it is important on laptops too!
Original Post:
I had my laptop lock up on me today which it almost never does and I realized it was scorching hot. I thought I remembered reading about some people having CPU heat issues running Ubuntu on their thinkpads, but I didn’t realy find any posts indicating that it was Ubuntu. Instead I found this post (http://justaddwater.dk/2007/11/06/lenovo-thinkpad-silent-fan/) talking about the ATI GPU causing issues. There is another long discussion about T60p GPU heat issues here too (http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=25304&start=180&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=).
I googled around to find a way to monitor the temperature and I found a reference a panel applet that did just the trick (sudo apt-get install computertemp, then reboot and click add to panel and find Computer Temperature Monitor).
With that I could see that at work with my laptop docked and attached to a 19 inch monitor the temps were up around 90C. But at home without the external monitor and docking station they are down in the 50-60C range. But the GPU does actually run hotter than the cpu and I can get it up above 70C easily by doing graphic intensive stuff like spinning my desktop cube in compiz.
As for how to lower it, I am still working on that, but I found this thread (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4895378)that showed how to lower the GPU frequency and that seemed to help a bit, but doesn’t work when the external monitor is attached. I also tried turning desktop effects (compiz) on and off and tried the open source dirver versus the ATI proprietary driver, but don’t see much difference. It seems that with the external monitor attached the GPU works a lot harder and my temps easily get into the 80s and even 90s.
I love my thinkpad, but having it get that hot when docked and driving an LCD panel is very frustrating and definitely lowers my opinion of it.
