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Comment by pwnna | Hacker News Reader

How did you get your T420 to have no heating issues? What processor/GPU combo do you have?

I have a T420 and have major heating issues with it playing games. I've tried everything: thinkpad fan control that turns the fan up to 7000RPM, clearing everything out with compressed air, replacing the thermal paste..

After a few years of observations, I think the problem may lie in software.. It seems like when I'm playing games and what not my CPU gets turboboosted, which stays there until it reaches about 90C, when it gets severely throttled, killing framerate and all. I use linux, so right now I have several scripts that goes and disables turbo boost. However, even at that point, it still will boost the CPU when running certain GL applications... Not sure why.

In fact, I've noticed this issue on all Sandybridge laptops I own/have encountered: the 2011 MBP, a dell inspiron... Ivy bridge computers seems to have no issue with this (W530, 2012 MBP).

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My wife uses my older T420 with a dual core i7 and an nvidia workstation GPU of some sort as a Sims 3/4 machine with Windows 8 and never has heat issues. I'm currently using a W530 with Red Hat 6 for work and it gets hot occasionally but never enough to feel more than mildly uncomfortable to the touch and certainly never enough to cause any short term problems. Granted, I only ever use it for running a few VMs, not for any games.

I wonder how many of these Macbook issues stem from popularity. If you look at any vendor's forums, you will find a bunch of posts about issues that a lot of people are having. They never make news, though, because how many people own an HP 5370-2wt20 laptop? A lot of people own HP laptops, but they don't have one model that makes up a large percentage of the laptop market. Macs, on the other hand, have a single (ish) model that makes up a large percentage of the laptop market. If there is an issue that affects 1% of HP 8209-c50mg buyers versus 1% of Macbook Pro buyers, only the Macbook numbers will be large enough to make news.

I've wondered that too about other manufactures defects, that they probably suffer the same flaws with the bad ball solder on the GPUs but they didn't sell the same numbers as a MBP so it goes unnoticed.

Not real Red Hat 6 though right? I used 6.2 all those years ago.

Do you mean RHEL 6? :-)

Yup. Sorry, I have a tendency to use Red Hat and RHEL interchangeably.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation release 6.5 (Santiago).

I skipped the Nvidia option and use the onboard Intel graphics, because I don't play games on laptops. All laptops get hot when used for gaming. I have a separate desktop for gaming.

> I have a T420 and have major heating issues with it playing games.

In my experience, almost no consumer laptop is designed with a gaming thermal load in mind (aka heavy cpu + max gpu for extended periods of time). I'm not even sure it's possible in a conventional laptop case.

... I know this is completely useless advice, but don't do heavy gaming on a laptop without expecting problems. There are other form factors much better thermally suited.

tl;dr: mobility/thermal-tolerance/performance, pick two

One thing is that the T420 is not sold as a consumer laptop. Under Windows, running AutoCAD/SolidWorks will drive temperature of 90+ degrees. This laptop is suppose to be for those kind of work. Furthermore, I'm not even running heavy games. I'm running things like FTL, or older 3D games like RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, or even sometimes just watching YouTube videos at 1080p.

Regardless, thermal performance under heavy load in laptop should either be tolerated, or the manufacturers should disable higher clock speeds.

My W530 on the other hand has no issue with heat. Heavy gaming puts it to about 75-80C. It is also much bulkier in size.

Edit: my dedicated graphics is off most of the time. Even then, CPU alone can drive the temperature up through the roof.

I always thought it was odd no one made an external heatsink for laptops.

Apparently at one point (1983) someone thought it was possible: http://papers.sae.org/831101/

Every heating issue I had with my T420 is solved by opening up the laptop and thoroughly cleaning with compressed air. It will stays good for a few years until the dust gathers up again.

Do you have numbers on what your computer's temperature is at when it's idling and when it's on full load (CPU maxed out)? At idle I'm coming in at around 52C with ambient temperature at around 20C. Full load I can go to 90C, when the computer will automatically downclock, which is something that's not desirable.

I have opened up my laptop more than once and cleaned all the areas i can, but I still can't seem to get the temperature to go down like others claim. At this point I'm considering replacing my fan assembly and see if I have better luck but haven't gotten around to do so.

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