X60 overheating with 7.1

[Josh Paetzel]

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George Neville-Neil wrote:
> 
> On Jan 15, 2009, at 16:55 , Alexandre Sunny Kovalenko wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 10:02 -0500, George Neville-Neil wrote:
>>> Replying to myself again.
>>>
>>> With the settings I discussed I got thermal shutdowns doing make -j 4
>>> buildworld
>>> after about 10 minutes each time.  I am going to swap the tz0 and tz1
>>> temperatures
>>> and try again.  Since tz1 is more sensitive (the CRT is 97) it makes
>>> more sense
>>> to be more aggressive cooling it than tz0 which has a CRT of 128.
>> ISTR that tz0 is some kind of a sham on X60 or, at least, on 1709-73U
>> that I own. It does not implement _PSV, _PSL, _TC1, _TC2 or _TSP and is
>> useless from passive cooling standpoint. Its _TMP method returns 128C
>> under some conditions _regardless of measured temperature_. Did you
>> actually see any attempts at passive cooling when you overrode _PSV in
>> tz0?
> 
> I kept overriding both, so not really sure.  I am attempting to update
> the box
> because I want to know if this was a failed set of modules (7.1 and 8.0).
> 
> Best,
> George

Disclaimer:  I don't have an X60, I have a T60, but I had incredibly
similar heat issues.

A few things I've never posted before to the mailing lists.

1)  My heat problems were somewhat intermittant.  Enough so that it
would fool me in to thinking software was fixing things.  I'd try some
change, and it would seem to work, or not, but every once in a while I
was able to run a mke -j4 buildworld without it hitting 100C and
shutting down.

2) IBM has admitted they had assembly problems.  If you browse around
you'll find some people who think their T60/X60/R60's are loud or have
unusably high heat, and some people who think the are quiet and
perfectly fine.  When I took mine apart the thermal compound was very
excessively applied (think 2 year old applying jelly to a sandwich) and
after I cleaned it up and reassembled it I thought I had damaged it
somehow as the cpu fan wasn't running at all.  It turns out that with a
proper amount of thermal paste it can handle low cpu load with only
passive cooling.  My CPU temps went from 65-70C at idle with the fan
running full out to 42-45C at idle with the fan either off or barely
running.  At full load it went from unusable to 65C with the fan
eventually ramping up to full speed after an hour or so of intensive use.

You may be hitting a software issue, but my issue was caused by hardware
and very intermittant, which lead me to believe it was software related
for months on end.

- --
Thanks,

Josh Paetzel

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