Lenovo T14s Gen1 overheating on AC

granchio · 2025-08-18 00:09:59

Hey everyone. My laptop has never been particularly efficient in heat control, hovering around 45-50C (in both battery and AC mode) on idle. I replaced the thermal paste a couple of months ago, so that should not be an issue.

Recently, after updating my firmware (fwupdmgr), I noticed that when I plug in the AC cable, the temperature rises around 10 degrees. Even now, while writing this post, it is spiking up to 70C, with no specific reason. If I unplug the AC cable, I have an immediate drop of 10-15C (the charger is original Lenovo, and I am using s-tui to monitor the temperature).

I tried looking on the wiki and on Lenovo's references, but there is not much information, except for some suggestions about Windows drivers. Has anyone faced this problem or something similar before?

Thank you a lot.

Last edited by granchio (2025-08-18 00:11:43)

ewaller · 2025-08-18 01:56:24

A couple questions.

None of this sounds untoward. What is the ambient temperature in the room? Its about 24° here and this laptop is running at 36° doing nothing.
In your case, it falls back on battery, so clearly your system is throttling back as it should. It sounds like your system is running 10°-ish more than mine; some of that could be a function of your ambient temperature.
Is there a reason you are worried about 70°C, it is still gives you about 30° of headroom below the 100° or so that processor should take.

How busy is your system? What do htop or other utilities say about processor loads?

d_fajardo · 2025-08-18 06:00:23

Recently, after updating my firmware (fwupdmgr), I noticed that when I plug in the AC cable, the temperature rises around 10 degrees.

You can try a hard reset of your laptop. I don't know how you do a hard reset in your laptop but with my Thinkpad it's pushing a tiny pin in a small pinhole. I encountered a similar problem after a firmware update and doing a hard reset fixed the problem.

granchio · 2025-08-18 14:20:11

Answering to ewaller:

A couple questions. None of this sounds untoward. What is the ambient temperature in the room?
It's around 27-8C ish. I am also using the laptop with a laptop stand to improve air circulation.

It's about 24° here and this laptop is running at 36° doing nothing. In your case, it falls back on battery, so clearly your system is throttling back as it should. It sounds like your system is running 10°-ish more than mine; some of that could be a function of your ambient
You are right to assume that in wither or with air conditioning things are better.

Is there a reason you are worried about 70°C, it is still gives you about 30° of headroom below the 100° or so that processor should take.
I am not worried per se, but years ago, when the pc was new, the idle/low load temps wouldn't really ever go above 60C, and the case would never get too uncomfortable for, e.g., typing. I assumed that if I properly maintained hardware and software, this should not have changed, but it did. I am puzzled and wonder if I made some mistake without realizing it.

How busy is your system? What do htop or other utilities say about processor loads?
While writing this post, I have around 5-6% load on all CPUs and use something like 2 GB of RAM (info from htop). s-tui gives CPU clocks around 1500MHz across the board, with short spikes up to 2000MHz at single cores. I mean, nothing crazy.

Answering to d_fajardo:

You can try a hard reset of your laptop.
I didn't know you could do that! I'll give it a try and report.

By the way, thank you a lot for the help, guys. I really appreciate it.

Last edited by granchio (2025-08-18 14:32:01)

seth · 2025-08-18 14:31:55

Please post the output of "sensors", god know what sensor your (I assume desktop widget thingy?) is looking at and there's a vast difference between the temp of a single core and the package and the case and also the temperatures of isolated cores can swing drastically and fast w/o even the fans getting involved (are they?)
Then post the output of

 cpupower frequency-info; cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo

granchio · 2025-08-18 15:03:34

seth wrote:

Please post the output of "sensors", god know what sensor your (I assume desktop widget thingy?) is looking at and there's a vast difference between the temp of a single core and the package and the case and also the temperatures of isolated cores can swing drastically and fast w/o even the fans getting involved (are they?)

Currently I am connected to AC but the battery is full, so this could be different from yesterday's conditions.
The output gives:

  driver: acpi-cpufreq
  CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 9
  CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 9
  maximum transition latency:  Cannot determine or is not supported.
  hardware limits: 1.40 GHz - 1.70 GHz
  available frequency steps:  1.70 GHz, 1.60 GHz, 1.40 GHz
  available cpufreq governors: conservative ondemand userspace powersave performance schedutil
  current policy: frequency should be within 1.40 GHz and 1.70 GHz.
                  The governor "schedutil" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency: 1.40 GHz (asserted by call to kernel)
  boost state support:
    Supported: yes
    Active: no
cat: /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo: No such file or directory

I think the inactive boost state comes from me tinkering with the kernel options in a previous trial to sink the temperatures.

From sensors (s-tui gives the same result): CPU temp is around 50C, and fans are off (yestedray they were around 80%).

My guess is that is something is happening, it is happening while the battery is being effectively charged (its not connected to AC while being already full).

seth · 2025-08-18 19:50:27

comes from me tinkering with the kernel options in a previous trial

Please elaborate, notably why you're using schedutil - is the cpu not supported by intel_pstate or did you "intel_pstate=disable"?

lscpu

granchio · 2025-08-18 22:39:24

seth wrote:

Please elaborate

Architecture:                x86_64
  CPU op-mode(s):            32-bit, 64-bit
  Address sizes:             48 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
  Byte Order:                Little Endian
CPU(s):                      16
  On-line CPU(s) list:       0-15
Vendor ID:                   AuthenticAMD
  Model name:                AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U with Radeon Graphics
    CPU family:              23
    Model:                   96
    Thread(s) per core:      2
    Core(s) per socket:      8
    Socket(s):               1
    Stepping:                1
    Frequency boost:         enabled
    CPU(s) scaling MHz:      85%
    CPU max MHz:             1700.0000
    CPU min MHz:             1400.0000
    BogoMIPS:                3393.58
    Flags:                   fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36
                              clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt pdpe1gb rdtscp
                              lm constant_tsc rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc cpuid extd_apicid 
                             aperfmperf rapl pni pclmulqdq monitor ssse3 fma cx16 sse4_1 sse4_2 movb
                             e popcnt aes xsave avx f16c rdrand lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_l
                             egacy abm sse4a misalignsse 3dnowprefetch osvw ibs skinit wdt tce topoe
                             xt perfctr_core perfctr_nb bpext perfctr_llc mwaitx cpb cat_l3 cdp_l3 h
                             w_pstate ssbd mba ibrs ibpb stibp vmmcall fsgsbase bmi1 avx2 smep bmi2 
                             cqm rdt_a rdseed adx smap clflushopt clwb sha_ni xsaveopt xsavec xgetbv
                             1 cqm_llc cqm_occup_llc cqm_mbm_total cqm_mbm_local clzero irperf xsave
                             erptr rdpru wbnoinvd arat npt lbrv svm_lock nrip_save tsc_scale vmcb_cl
                             ean flushbyasid decodeassists pausefilter pfthreshold avic v_vmsave_vml
                             oad vgif v_spec_ctrl umip rdpid overflow_recov succor smca
Virtualization features:     
  Virtualization:            AMD-V
Caches (sum of all):         
  L1d:                       256 KiB (8 instances)
  L1i:                       256 KiB (8 instances)
  L2:                        4 MiB (8 instances)
  L3:                        8 MiB (2 instances)
NUMA:                        
  NUMA node(s):              1
  NUMA node0 CPU(s):         0-15
Vulnerabilities:             
  Gather data sampling:      Not affected
  Ghostwrite:                Not affected
  Indirect target selection: Not affected
  Itlb multihit:             Not affected
  L1tf:                      Not affected
  Mds:                       Not affected
  Meltdown:                  Not affected
  Mmio stale data:           Not affected
  Old microcode:             Not affected
  Reg file data sampling:    Not affected
  Retbleed:                  Mitigation; untrained return thunk; SMT enabled with STIBP protection
  Spec rstack overflow:      Mitigation; Safe RET
  Spec store bypass:         Mitigation; Speculative Store Bypass disabled via prctl
  Spectre v1:                Mitigation; usercopy/swapgs barriers and __user pointer sanitization
  Spectre v2:                Mitigation; Retpolines; IBPB conditional; STIBP always-on; RSB filling;
                              PBRSB-eIBRS Not affected; BHI Not affected
  Srbds:                     Not affected
  Tsa:                       Not affected
  Tsx async abort:           Not affected

Concerning schedulutil: I will be very honest, I have no idea what it does or how it ended up there. The cpu is AMD, so I guess it uses amd_pstate instead of intel_pstate.

Concerning the tinkering: I disabled the boost via amd_pstate=passive. I should definitely put it back to active though, as the performance drop is noticeable.

Again, thanks for the interest!

seth · 2025-08-19 07:22:20

My bad for just assuming the CPU to be intel

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/boost

but yes, you want to test the active in in doubt guided mode, https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CPU_fr … amd_pstate

granchio · 2025-08-19 09:44:38

No worries for the assumption!

In regard to amd_pstate, apparently it cannot be enabled on AMD T14s Gen 1, since the hardware does not support CPPC (post). So I guess I will need to stay with acpi-cpufreq.

If you have any advice on how to tweak that to dynamically optimize cpu power/battery life+temps please let me konw. I will keep this thread updated in case I find some workaround or things get better on their own.

seth · 2025-08-19 13:32:36

I'd first and foremost test whether the battery/temperature situation (vastly) changes w/ the powersave governor, https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CPU_fr … _governors
/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/boost should™ still be available but idk whether it does anything on your CPU.

Arch Linux

#1 2025-08-18 00:09:59

Lenovo T14s Gen1 overheating on AC

#2 2025-08-18 01:56:24

Re: Lenovo T14s Gen1 overheating on AC

#3 2025-08-18 06:00:23

Re: Lenovo T14s Gen1 overheating on AC

#4 2025-08-18 14:20:11

Re: Lenovo T14s Gen1 overheating on AC

#5 2025-08-18 14:31:55

Re: Lenovo T14s Gen1 overheating on AC

#6 2025-08-18 15:03:34

Re: Lenovo T14s Gen1 overheating on AC

#7 2025-08-18 19:50:27

Re: Lenovo T14s Gen1 overheating on AC

#8 2025-08-18 22:39:24

Re: Lenovo T14s Gen1 overheating on AC

#9 2025-08-19 07:22:20

Re: Lenovo T14s Gen1 overheating on AC

#10 2025-08-19 09:44:38

Re: Lenovo T14s Gen1 overheating on AC

#11 2025-08-19 13:32:36

Re: Lenovo T14s Gen1 overheating on AC

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