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#1 2009-11-23 18:56:18

AerialX
Member
Registered: 2009-11-23
Posts: 5

Lenovo Thinkpad T500 Overheating

Just recently my new laptop that has had Arch installed on it for months has started overheating. While it used to be around 35C when idle, it's now idling at around 48C, and doing anything CPU intensive can easily and quickly bring it up to 65C. I left it idling last night, closed, with just xchat open and it ended up reaching 127C and then shut itself off. The sensors seem fine since I can feel it almost burn me when I touch the bottom of the laptop when it says it's at 65C.

This does not seem to be a hardware problem, because I've monitored it in Windows. When idling in Windows XP, it's at 35C just like it used to be in Arch. When I do something CPU-intensive it reaches 48C, but rarely goes higher and goes back down to 35C the second I stop it.

So I'm not really sure what might be causing this to happen now in Arch, I can hear the fan running right now fairly loudly... I'm guessing it's some sort of update that happened recently in the past month or so, but I'm really not sure. I tried downgrading to kernel26-2.6.30.6, but it didn't seem to help. I also tried using the fglrx driver vs the radeonhd driver just in case (I had recently switched), but that didn't do anything either, and the problem doesn't seem related to X at all (still idles hot in a console before X has even started).

Any help at all would be appreciated, I just need some suggestions to point me in the right direction to solve this problem...

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#2 2009-11-23 19:42:51

vi3dr0
Member
From: Poland
Registered: 2009-03-22
Posts: 208

Re: Lenovo Thinkpad T500 Overheating

Is can't think of any kind of load that would make it heat like that. That's just weird.

Do you use any script to control fan speed?  (eg. tp-fancontrol)


Thinkpad T61p : T7700 | 4GB RAM | nVidia FX 570M | Intel 4965
Arch64 @ Openbox

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#3 2009-11-23 19:57:39

AerialX
Member
Registered: 2009-11-23
Posts: 5

Re: Lenovo Thinkpad T500 Overheating

vi3dr0 wrote:

Is can't think of any kind of load that would make it heat like that. That's just weird.

Do you use any script to control fan speed?  (eg. tp-fancontrol)

Yeah, I did. I set the fan speed to the highest and it really did nothing but continuously blow out hot air.

I did track down the problem just now, though. It's my graphics (ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650). Even when my laptop is idling at the console with no X, it was sitting there at 60C, which apparently was heating up my CPU too. So I went into my BIOS settings and changed it to always use the integrated graphics rather than discrete, and here I am in links with everything around 30C. The fan is slightly blowing right now, but it's cool air, not hot.

Now I need to find out how to keep my ATI graphics card in check, I guess. Windows seems to be able to handle it, and Arch did until just recently (I used to have temperatures around 35C when Compiz Fusion was running). I'm not even sure what the integrated graphics here means, or what driver I would use for X. For the record, I have a Core 2 Duo P8600.

EDIT: Duh, tried xf86-video-intel... Apparently the integrated card is a GMA X4500... At least I have X now and no overheating, but I want my ATI working, things are slower hmm

Last edited by AerialX (2009-11-23 20:23:18)

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#4 2009-11-23 23:39:46

grey
Member
From: Europe
Registered: 2007-08-23
Posts: 679

Re: Lenovo Thinkpad T500 Overheating

I have a similar problem with a T60p. It's not just Arch - any distro I run on it (arch, browserlinux, ubuntu, debian stable) has that problem, with temperatures going up to 95 C while I'm editing a document. The only solution is to set fan control to disengaged, which makes the machines very noisy and eats up the battery.
And as the OP I know it's not a hardware fault because Windows XP runs just fine.


Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.

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#5 2009-11-24 00:19:03

takedown
Member
From: Argentina
Registered: 2008-08-31
Posts: 219

Re: Lenovo Thinkpad T500 Overheating

Hello, I too have a thinkpad T500 and use the integrated Intel. The strange thing is that using kde4 with active desktop effects, everything is very fluid. I honestly do not use the ATI precisely because of its heat and battery drain, and since the intel is behaving so well.
When I play some game in windows (like NFS) temperatures are very high.

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#6 2009-11-24 00:19:12

chpln
Member
From: Australia
Registered: 2009-09-17
Posts: 361

Re: Lenovo Thinkpad T500 Overheating

Same here with a T500.  It runs quite warm, though hasn't (yet) reached a point where it overheats.  The main problem is the drain on the battery, which I suspect, is caused by the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650.  Idle with 9-cell battery yields 6+ hours in Vista, ~3 hours in GNU/Linux (laptop-mode, backlight dimmed, etc.).

I believe Windows is capable of alternating to and from onboard video, depending on usage.  Unfortunately, I've not came across similar support for GNU/Linux.

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#7 2009-11-24 15:02:48

AerialX
Member
Registered: 2009-11-23
Posts: 5

Re: Lenovo Thinkpad T500 Overheating

The thing that bothers me about this is that it doesn't seem to be a hardware problem because Windows handles it well (I'd expect some heat during gameplay, though I don't play games that much). So nothing hardware-related seems to have changed. The fact that Arch used to handle it fine is what's bothering me.

Back in September and October, I was using compiz fusion all the time, with the catalyst driver, and it always stayed at 35C, even when rotating cubes and all that. Now, it overheats before the video mode even - or never - changes. I had recently changed over to the radeonhd drivers (I gave up compiz fusion and anything 3D for decent X performance in awesome), and that was around the time I noticed the overheating - not that I really knew what it was at first, but I noticed my battery time was significantly lower. Now that I pinned down the problem yesterday, I tried catalyst again but it didn't seem to do anything. It was a newer version though, maybe I should try the older one I'd originally used?

chpln wrote:

Same here with a T500.  It runs quite warm, though hasn't (yet) reached a point where it overheats.  The main problem is the drain on the battery, which I suspect, is caused by the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650.  Idle with 9-cell battery yields 6+ hours in Vista, ~3 hours in GNU/Linux (laptop-mode, backlight dimmed, etc.).

I believe Windows is capable of alternating to and from onboard video, depending on usage.  Unfortunately, I've not came across similar support for GNU/Linux.

If you go into the BIOS settings where you can disable the discrete card, there's a "Switchable" option that it says is only supported by Windows Vista with the correct drivers installed. Not sure if that's what's happening for you, it just seems to be something like the Windows drivers being able to control the card better, or manage power, or something...

Last edited by AerialX (2009-11-24 15:05:28)

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#8 2010-01-11 22:40:46

yaroslav
Member
Registered: 2010-01-11
Posts: 3

Re: Lenovo Thinkpad T500 Overheating

Did anybody find the cause for this strange behavior?

Last edited by yaroslav (2010-01-12 03:57:12)

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#9 2010-01-12 13:06:41

archer108
Member
From: Zurich Switzerland
Registered: 2007-08-28
Posts: 59

Re: Lenovo Thinkpad T500 Overheating

I had that problem as well, after a reinstall and making sure cpufreq works correctly, the heat problem was solved. In general the laptop get heated up more then with my first installation of ARCH but the fan is not to noisy now.

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#10 2010-07-17 15:16:49

inode
Member
Registered: 2010-02-15
Posts: 8

Re: Lenovo Thinkpad T500 Overheating

Me too. However, good news... the devs are working on it, see http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p= … ostcount=3

So either wait for the fix to be implemented in the latest kernel, or comment out nohz_ratelimit in kernel/time/tick-sched.c as per http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/7/8/122

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#11 2010-07-23 03:31:00

Bionic Apple
Member
Registered: 2008-08-05
Posts: 59

Re: Lenovo Thinkpad T500 Overheating

I had a similiar problem with my W500 and I found an easy solution to keep switchable graphics, which may help some.  From what is sounds like, the OP won't really benefit.

As it turns out, it is the dual-graphics card setup that was causing the problems for me.  By default, Linux doesn't really know what to do, so it keeps both running.  Even worse, powersaving features may not be enabled on the T500's Ati card, which makes it even worse.  This is the case with my W500 Ati card.

Just in Linux 2.6.34 there is rudimentary switchable graphics support.

So, what was my solution?  I put this in my rc.local config file:

## Switchable graphics
# Mount debug kernel filesystem to get access to vgaswitcheroo's controls
# NOTE: this is actually not in my rc.local for some reason I forgot, but it is a needed step.
mount -t debugfs none /sys/kernel/debug

# Make 'video' group have access to changing it
chgrp "video"     /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch
chmod  g+rw        /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

# Power off unused card
# NOTE: this is always the Ati card for me, which is what I want, so I haven't
#       needed to change the "used" card above.
echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

This will use the default card (for me it is the Intel card) and power-down the other one entirely.  This works so I can keep switchable-graphics enabled in the BIOS, which is nice. Otherwise I would have to disable it to save power in Linux and enable it to use any card in Windows.

I did this based on this guide which was made when Linux 2.6.34 was still in testing.  So in other words, forget about the compiling steps, you don't need to worry about them.  Oh, and by the way, the code above won't work and isn't necessary if you have switchable graphics disabled in the BIOS.

Hope that helps somewhat, unless you are mainly concerned about the Ati's card lack of powersaving.  Then, well, I've got nothing, sorry.

Last edited by Bionic Apple (2010-07-23 04:29:58)

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#12 2011-01-05 05:39:29

AerialX
Member
Registered: 2009-11-23
Posts: 5

Re: Lenovo Thinkpad T500 Overheating

Well, I just got my T500 back and decided to fight this problem again... Have had no luck with various ATI powersaving methods so far, using the open source drivers or fglrx.

I'd be very happy with that vgaswitcheroo method, but whatever I do I can't get it to show up in /sys/kernel/debug (yes I'm mounting the debugfs).

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#13 2011-01-16 14:36:07

ViruSzZ
Member
From: The Streets
Registered: 2010-10-14
Posts: 202
Website

Re: Lenovo Thinkpad T500 Overheating

Can you try booting your system with KMS enabled? I have the same issue with the hybrid graphics on my HP g62 notebook. The vgaswitcheroo will show up (in my case) only if booted with KMS enabled (for both Intel and Ati), but I have other problem once it is enabled and ATI disabled in it (switcheroo), I can`t start the X server (my system freezes with a blank screen and have to reboot it manually), but that seem to be due to the xorg.conf i guess so I`ll figure it out shortly.

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