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#1 2013-09-11 10:36:10

alexyakushev
Member
Registered: 2013-07-02
Posts: 9

Thinkpad X220 (i5-2450M) heats up to 95°C under load

So, power managements problems return. I experienced power regression back at 3.6.* days, which I fixed with adding the line "pcie_aspm=force i915.modeset=1 i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 i915.i915_enable_fbc=1 i915.lvds_downclock=1" to grub config. Then with 3.8 laptop ran pretty fine. After that at some point I started experiencing temperature rises after suspend/wakeup. Now they are gone, but for a long time I've been noticing heavy CPU overheating when CPU is extensively used.

I'm currently at 3.10.10-1-ARCH kernel, 64-bit system. When loaded, CPU fan spins like hell (~4500 rpm) and the CPU is still ridiculously hot. I thought problems to be related to graphic drivers, but when I do GPU benchmark (Unigine Heaven), CPU temperature floats around 80 degrees. But some simple number crunching is enough to get it to 95. Still I don't exclude the possible trouble with graphics.

Without the load, the temperature is fine, ~50 degrees.

I would much appreciate any help and insights on this problem.

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#2 2013-09-11 10:46:25

Trilby
Inspector Parrot
Registered: 2011-11-29
Posts: 29,442
Website

Re: Thinkpad X220 (i5-2450M) heats up to 95°C under load

Have you cleaned dust out of the heatsink?  And/or is it cooler while running other OSes?

Last edited by Trilby (2013-09-11 10:46:57)


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#3 2013-09-11 11:13:50

alexyakushev
Member
Registered: 2013-07-02
Posts: 9

Re: Thinkpad X220 (i5-2450M) heats up to 95°C under load

I did disassemble the laptop and cleaned the dust as much as I could (I can't take the CPU+fan unit out because it looks like it is soldered, but I might give it another try).

I can't try Windows, but I tried running the latest Ubuntu LiveCD, and loading the CPU shows the same temperature increase.

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#4 2013-09-11 16:30:25

sandy8925
Member
Registered: 2013-06-25
Posts: 22

Re: Thinkpad X220 (i5-2450M) heats up to 95°C under load

If the CPU is under heavy load, and when operating at higher frequencies it will use up more power and produce more heat. That's pretty obvious.

For software ways to fix this, figure out which program's CPU usage is so high. Do you need it? No, then remove it. If yes, try to figure out if it's CPU usage should really be that high. For example an IM program with just one chat window open, with very few messages per minute shouldn't take >20% CPU usage (of course depends on your CPU and RAM).
Might be a bug in the program.

Another thing to check is which CPU governor you are using. Ondemand, powersaver, performance (or something else?). Also, what power profile is your desktop environment using?

Maybe graphics are drawn using CPU (software rendering)?

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#5 2013-09-11 21:57:59

alexyakushev
Member
Registered: 2013-07-02
Posts: 9

Re: Thinkpad X220 (i5-2450M) heats up to 95°C under load

Thank you for the response, sandy8925.

While I agree with your first statement, operating close to critical temperature is certainly not the way it was designed to be (especially since there wasn't such a problem before).

I use this laptop to do computation-intensive research, so no, this ain't IM that is eating away my CPU. Streaming HQ video from also sometimes results in this (but usually it is more moderate with video, about 80 degrees).

Governor is set to powersave on both AC and battery.

I don't know if software rendering is used, but the heating occurs when loading CPU with no graphics at all, just computation.

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#6 2013-09-11 23:12:57

cfr
Member
From: Cymru
Registered: 2011-11-27
Posts: 7,130

Re: Thinkpad X220 (i5-2450M) heats up to 95°C under load

alexyakushev wrote:

So, power managements problems return. I experienced power regression back at 3.6.* days, which I fixed with adding the line "pcie_aspm=force i915.modeset=1 i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 i915.i915_enable_fbc=1 i915.lvds_downclock=1" to grub config. Then with 3.8 laptop ran pretty fine. After that at some point I started experiencing temperature rises after suspend/wakeup. Now they are gone, but for a long time I've been noticing heavy CPU overheating when CPU is extensively used.

Try removing pcie_aspm=force (you probably don't need it) and i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 (it may be forcing the machine to use less power-saving rather than more). I also use i915.semaphores=1 but I cannot now honestly remember what this does.

I am guessing you are using the intel pstate stuff as cpu governor? Although this should work better than the traditional acpi_cpufreq way, there were some reports early on that it could cause excessive heating on some hardware. So you might consider disabling it and using the acpi_cpufreq module with the ondemand governor just to see. If that's better, you should definitely report the bug, though, because it definitely should not improve things.


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#7 2013-09-30 17:56:49

donniezazen
Member
From: Salt Lake City
Registered: 2011-06-24
Posts: 671
Website

Re: Thinkpad X220 (i5-2450M) heats up to 95°C under load

alexyakushev wrote:

I use this laptop to do computation-intensive research, so no, this ain't IM that is eating away my CPU. Streaming HQ video from also sometimes results in this (but usually it is more moderate with video, about 80 degrees).

Depending on what you are doing building packages, watching flash video, etc. they tend to increase system load. I think it is normal for system temperature to rise to close to your max limit. You should only worry if your system load/temperature is high when you are not doing anything.

You may want to do your testing without any kernel options. You may also want to try linux-mainline to see it also suffers from high system load/temperature.

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#8 2013-10-03 20:28:40

Loser777
Member
Registered: 2011-05-12
Posts: 28

Re: Thinkpad X220 (i5-2450M) heats up to 95°C under load

donniezazen wrote:
alexyakushev wrote:

I use this laptop to do computation-intensive research, so no, this ain't IM that is eating away my CPU. Streaming HQ video from also sometimes results in this (but usually it is more moderate with video, about 80 degrees).

Depending on what you are doing building packages, watching flash video, etc. they tend to increase system load. I think it is normal for system temperature to rise to close to your max limit. You should only worry if your system load/temperature is high when you are not doing anything.

You may want to do your testing without any kernel options. You may also want to try linux-mainline to see it also suffers from high system load/temperature.

I also recommend removing any kernel options. I have a T420 (which is quite similar to the X220 in terms of internals), and I had the same issues with power consumption. Towards 3.8-3.9+ normal operation would be fine (without any kernel options), but resuming from suspend caused problems occasionally. This was fixed in 3.10.x, so the first thing to try is to remove your kernel options. I also didn't manually set any cpu frequency governors: /proc/cpuinfo reports that the frequency scaling behaves as expected.

The first thing to look for is if /proc/cpuinfo shows all cores to be locked at maximum frequency.

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#9 2013-10-19 11:06:27

ValdikSS
Member
Registered: 2011-03-30
Posts: 31

Re: Thinkpad X220 (i5-2450M) heats up to 95°C under load

Try intel_pstate=disable

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#10 2016-09-20 21:48:12

oprs
Member
Registered: 2016-09-20
Posts: 1

Re: Thinkpad X220 (i5-2450M) heats up to 95°C under load

I realize that this is a ~3 years old thread, but I've been experiencing the same issue recently (95°C under load), and I'm hoping that my contribution can help someone in the future.  After all, the X220 is still a very capable laptop;  I wouldn't be surprised if it remained popular for a number of years.

Here's my advice: go ahead and open up the beast.  Either replace the heating element (fan + heat sink) or thoroughly clean up / dust off the fan.  In any case, do yourself a favor and reapply a fresh coat of quality thermal compound.  I had great results with the Arctic MX-2, although I suppose any renowned brand will do just as well.

You'll have to disassemble the whole laptop in order to access the heating element.  Don't let this put you off though, it's easier than it looks.  I found that taking pictures as you go helps a lot.  Take your time, don't do anything stupid (like trying to force things out), and everything will be fine.

note: check out this youtube video ("How To: Take apart and repair Lenovo x220t / x230t" by Brian Hoyt) if you want to get an idea of what you are getting yourself into beforehand.

Now for the obligatory comparative results, I have 4 instances of

md5sum /dev/urandom

running as I'm typing this, and I can barely hit 80°C (actually the fan just reved up a notch as the temperature passed 80°C, and now I'm back to 78-79), whereas one instance alone used to be enough to shoot the CPU temp right up to 95°C before.  My idle temp is now about 40°C (with a couple of browser windows and some xterm + vi running), overall I gained a good 20°C.  No more excessive fan noise, no more throttling.

Just my 2 cents.

Last edited by oprs (2016-09-20 22:03:24)

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#11 2016-09-20 22:09:35

jasonwryan
Anarchist
From: .nz
Registered: 2009-05-09
Posts: 30,424
Website

Re: Thinkpad X220 (i5-2450M) heats up to 95°C under load

Please don't necrobump; reapplying thermal paste is hardly a revolutionary suggestion
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Co … bumping.22


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