T60 HDD & fan noise

I've purchased a T60 (among other reasons) because I've read in several reviews that they are extremely quiet. I must admit that I'm not very satisfied with my T60 in that regard.

Firstly, the Toshiba MK8034GSX HDD seems to be extremely loud. The seek/write noise is ok but the idle noise is louder than all other notebook drives I've used and very disturbing in a quiet environment.

Secondly, the fan kicks in very often and is far from silent too. I've used thermal management tools in order to check what's causing this and it seems that it's the X1400 GPU, which often has more than 65°C (the CPU is only in the 40s). I have activated PowerPlay and set it to "Battery Optimized". It seems to work because the X1400 is clocked down to 128/135Mhz, but it's still running that hot. Is this normal? Is there anyway to reduce the heat-output of the GPU in order to silence the fan?

Thanks a lot for your help!

 

Are you running the CPU in low power mode? That may help reduce the heat if you don't need all the power. Ask them to swap the drive if you feel it is too loud. The Seagate I have now is the quietest drive I have ever used, but I have heard from other that theirs is not as quiet as mine. It may be hit or miss.

 

Sure, I'm at 1GHz and 0,95V and the CPU is running very cool. It's the high GPU temp that causes the fan to kick in. If I manually stop the fan via tpfancontrol, the GPU temp quickly rises to 75°C...

 

The gpu is what causes my T41p to kick up the fan speed too. I think it's just an inevitable drawback to having the faster GPU.

To set tpfan control, I determined the max fan-stopped temp and set tpfancontrol to cycle the fan on and off around that temp. It idles the fan until the cpu is near the max no-fan temp but triggers off the gpu idle temps, and then it runs for a few min until the gpu drops several degrees. It gives me about a 30-40% fan on, 60-70% fan off cycle.

I use the lowest fan speed and it drops the gpu and cpu fan right away. I set it so I can do web browsing, email, and basic word processing without the fan ever jumping to the middle speed, but if I do any gaming it jumps straight to the highest fan speed. Even there though, the gpu keeps climbing to 98C and I assume higher, although tpfancontrol doesn't ever display a temp over 98. At that speed, the gpu is pretty much heating up the cpu since maxing out the cpu using prime95 without using the gpu results in a cpu temp that is much lower than the highest cpu temp I see when I'm also using the gpu heavily.

So that's why as soon as the gpu hits a certain temp, I just jump the fan to max.

 

That would suck, because I only got the X1400 in order to have SXGA resolution.... I don't use it for gaming or anything like that.

I also tried the newest Omega drivers but they didn't change a thing. I was hoping that they'd provide an option to lower the voltage of the GPU, but they only allow for a change in core/memory clock same as NHC or the standard Catalyst driver.

Can anyone using a T60 14" with X1400 confirm that this behavior and these gpu temps (always 65-57°C when downclocked, ambient temperature <20°C) are normal?

 

The x1300/x1400 is not required for SXGA+ resolution. My R60 has SXGA+ with the Intel card. What did Lenovo have to say about it? I never had any heat issues with my T42 and 9600. I have have only seen the T60 with the x1300. It didn't seem overly noisy or hot. If you are within the return period you could send it back.

 

Well at least here in Austria the SXGA+ models weren't available with onboard graphics.

Lenovo didn't say anything at all yet, but I just contacted them yesterday, so I'll first wait what they have to say.