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LeftyAce

Member

Registered: 2012-08-18

Posts: 159

[SOLVED] How to determine correct temperature thresholds for thinkfan

Hi all,

I have a Lenovo X1Carbon with an i7-8550U CPU. I've installed Thinkfan to control the fan, but I need to manually set the temperature thresholds for various fan speeds. How should I determine what temperatures are ok for this CPU? My current settings result in the fan running non-stop because the CPU only goes down to around 45C at idle:

######################################################################
# thinkfan 0.7 example config file
# ================================
#
# ATTENTION: There is only very basic sanity checking on the configuration.
# That means you can set your temperature limits as insane as you like. You
# can do anything stupid, e.g. turn off your fan when your CPU reaches 70°C.
#
# That's why this program is called THINKfan: You gotta think for yourself.
#
######################################################################
#
# IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads (thinkpad_acpi, /proc/acpi/ibm)
# ====================================================
#
# IMPORTANT:
#
# To keep your HD from overheating, you have to specify a correction value for
# the sensor that has the HD's temperature. You need to do this because
# thinkfan uses only the highest temperature it can find in the system, and
# that'll most likely never be your HD, as most HDs are already out of spec
# when they reach 55 °C.
# Correction values are applied from left to right in the same order as the
# temperatures are read from the file.
#
# For example:
# tp_thermal /proc/acpi/ibm/thermal (0, 0, 10)
# will add a fixed value of 10 °C the 3rd value read from that file. Check out
# http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Thermal_Sensors to find out how much you may
# want to add to certain temperatures.

#  Syntax:
#  (LEVEL, LOW, HIGH)
#  LEVEL is the fan level to use (0-7 with thinkpad_acpi)
#  LOW is the temperature at which to step down to the previous level
#  HIGH is the temperature at which to step up to the next level
#  All numbers are integers.
#

tp_thermal /proc/acpi/ibm/thermal (0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0)

(0,    0,    45)
(1,    43,    50)
(2,    40,    51)
(3,    42,    53)
(4,    46,    55)
(5,    49,    56)
(7,    43,    32767)

Any ideas would be much appreciated!

Last edited by LeftyAce (2020-07-11 18:39:12)

ondoho

Member

Registered: 2013-04-30

Posts: 692

Website

Re: [SOLVED] How to determine correct temperature thresholds for thinkfan

Isn't this a fairly new thinkpad? Is any sort of user action even required to control fans? AFAIK, this sort of stuff just happens on BIOS level.
thinkfan had its last udate in 2016: https://sourceforge.net/projects/thinkfan/
Are you sure it's suitable for your thinkpad?

LeftyAce

Member

Registered: 2012-08-18

Posts: 159

Re: [SOLVED] How to determine correct temperature thresholds for thinkfan

Thank you ondoho, I don't know why I thought I needed to run Thinkfan, but I uninstalled it and everything's working great. You're right, it's handled by the BIOS. I've been fighting with various Thinkfan issues for 6 months, so now I feel pretty dumb and very relieved :-)