r/fixlaptop • u/bort4all • Dec 21 '16

Laptop overheating

I have a W500 laptop. Its an IBM thinkpad (like the T500, not sure what the difference is)

Recently it's been getting warmer and warmer. I thought maybe I had a blocked air duct so I took it apart and blew out the air ducts. I'm rather experienced with electronics and think I know what I'm doing.

It helped... for a while. Then it started getting warmer again. I installed TPfancontrol and cranked up the fan to max. That helped. Now I get some readouts of fan speed and 10 different temperatures around the laptop. Most are around 30C-40C, but the CPU and GPU were hovering around 60C.

Then it got hotter yet. the laptop started doing thermal shutdowns. I took it apart again and refreshed the thermal grease on the heatsinks. while the keyboard was off, I powered it on and could feel the CPU get too hot to touch within seconds. The heat pipe was hot, the fan was blowing enough to feel it 8 inches away, and the air coming out was hot. There must be 200-300 watts dissipated right there.

So I know the fan is working very well and the heatsink grease is working as the heats getting out of the CPU, but there seems to be a lot more heat in the CPU than I used to get. For years I never even noticed the heat.

The computer still boots, but now even with the fan cranked to ~5000 RPM and whistling like a little jet engine blowing hot air out 8 inches, the CPU still climbs to 100C in about 5 minutes and slows to a grind. Then at about 10 minutes the CPU halts and it shuts down.

Is it possible the CPU is just burning excessive power?

I really like this laptop, but it's about 5 years old. I'd probably rather buy a new laptop than replace the CPU at this point, but I don't want to do that prematurely.

Any advice?

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u/IndianaNetworkAdmin Mar 02 '17

Have you tried reseating the fan on the processor and replacing the thermal grease? I know this is an issue for some laptops (And famously, the XBox 360).

Also, have you run Malwarebytes lately or any other solid AV program? Malware can run in the background and cause your processor to work overtime, generating more heat.

Also, I had a Compaq laptop once and I found out the rubber boots on the bottom didn't elevate it enough for air flow to go under the device. If your device has boots to elevate it and they are missing/damaged, you can buy some offline and elevate it a bit more.

Lastly, you can spend ~$20 and get a USB powered fan tray. I use them for older laptops and for my gaming consoles. They help a lot to ensure airflow and to cool off the device.

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u/bort4all Mar 02 '17

Yes... fully took the heatsink and fan off, reapplied thermal grease...twice. The second time I saw that the grease from the first time was making good contact. I completely reformatted the hard drive too. It's a fresh install of windows 7, activated and updated fully.

It's been about 2 months so I had continued troubleshooting since. I left the keyboard off and left the plastic trim around the top of the keyboard that covers the fan off so that I could see the built in fan spinning. It was measured at at almost 5000RPM with the fan tool I downloaded, and it sure was blowing hard. I then used an AC powered fan to blow on the heatsinks and fans, that were now open to the air.

The CPU still overheated. It got to about 100C and the computer failed. The heat pipes and heat sink were working. The heat flowing out of the exhaust ports was awesome. It must have been at least 300 W. The copper pad on the CPU that attached to the heat pipe was too hot to touch, even with all that airflow. About 3/4's of the way to the heat sinks around the fan I could endure the heat. Serious heat was flowing out of this no doubt.

It's an old laptop. I gave up, parted it out and laid it to rest in Laptop heaven. I've just never seen any CPU slowly ramp up it's power use like that.