X60 overheating with 7.1

[George Neville-Neil]

On Jan 16, 2009, at 15:28 , Josh Paetzel wrote:
>
> 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.

This sounds quite familiar.

> 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.
>

I started down the path of opening the box but it's pretty complex and  
even with the manual
getting to the CPU seemed fraught with peril.  If there were a site  
like ifixit
that had a good set of "to get to the CPU" I might attempt it again.

There are some factors that lead me away from a hardware problem:

1) This machine was previously owned by my other half, who ran XP and  
Vista on it
with no problems.

2) It really does seem related to 7.1 RELEASE vs. 7.1 STABLE and  
CURRENT.  I have re-installed
RELEASE twice and built -j 4 on it with no problems.

That being said, I may still look at the CPU paste.

Thanks,
Geore