W520 and heat

Hello everyone
After a lot of researches and a lot of pms to various users, I'm close to purchase a W520 but I would like to get one last information.
I decided to use a topic and not pms because this could be useful to other people and also a topic will involve more people.

My question is simple, I know that the upper-left side of the notebook is the most hot part.
How much heat do you generally feel on your left hand after few hours of full system load?
Does it get pretty hot and uncomfortable or not?
Two general situations concern me: games and computergraphic.
I will use a lot of May and other modelling software and I generally use a lot keys like "12345qwertasdfg", same goes for games (not too demanding games), I generally use the same keys, so having that part of the notebook cool is pretty important.
Does the W520 gets pretty hot in that area of the keyboard? Does it become uncomfortable or not?
I honestly had one single notebook in the past that was really cool in that area of the keyboard (and hot on the opposite side), all the other notebooks were always hot in that "123qweasd" area, making working (and occasional games) a pain.

Thank you!

 

sorry to bump but do you have no info to share?

 

He is asking questions, but instead of doing it in PMs he made a thread so others can read it.

 

Thanks but I believe I know this, I did the topic eheh No one answered and I bumped. I would really like to have some info about heat in that specific area of the keyboard.

 

The CPU and GPU are both under there, so you'd probably get above-average temperatures there.

 

From personal experiences, after Linpack + Furmark on 1080p Xtreme Burn-in for an hour and 15mins (98C on CPU, 92C on GPU), it gets hot-ish in my opinion. It doesn't get uncomfortably hot, but you can definitely feel that there is heat coming from it. It gets to around the temperature of bath water, I'd guess (see this for temperatures). The keyboard stays relatively cool, as most of the cooling system is under the speaker grille. The top left part of the base, on the speaker grille, and the bottom under the CPU and GPU do get pretty hot, though.

 

If you leave the fans to the current stock bios settings then yes, it can get a tad hot in that corner. The fans don't really spin up as fast as they can with the stock settings and the cpu will sit at 95-98C if the GPU is also loaded. This kind of heat soak will make the keyboard face of the laptop get a bit warm.

Now..... do what a lot of us do, run Tpfancontrol (the version made for the W520, I've posted on it before) and spin the fans up to max speed, and instead of sitting at 95-98C, the CPU won't go much above 80-85C and the temps everywhere in and on the laptop will be fairly cool.

 

Thank you for the info and thank you for the Tpfancontrol advice, that is very helpful
I understood that the upper left side could become pretty warm but I imagine that the lower left side (palm/wrist rest) should be relatively cool, is this right?

 

Yep. By the way, a new BIOS was released today that has improved the cooling operation on my laptop considerably. While it still gets a bit warm when loaded up, the fan speeds are much better at idle and in between. I may consider going without tpfancontrol.

 

Where is it? I don't see it here
Drivers and software - ThinkPad T420, T420i, T420s, T420si, T520, T520i and W520

 

There is a link in the W520 owners thread to it.

 

I have a fully packed W520 and I've never noticed any part-warm.

Renee

 

Compared to the right palm rest under maximum load (Linpack + Furmark)? Not really. Both the CPU and GPU are at least partially under the left palm rest. It gets warm, but not too warm in my opinion given the temperature of the components inside. Something like bath water warm. When gaming, it does get warm, but definitely cooler than full load. I think the heat is fine, and is definitely much better than the left palm rest on my netbook (I think the left palm rest on the netbook when it is idling feels about as hot as the left palm rest on the W520 feels when gaming).

 

Thank you again, very kind.
I wish I could try it before pulling the trigger but, sadly, it's really rare to find people witht thinkpads here
Also finding a good alternative to the w520 is not easy xD With almost the same power, long battery life, full HD and not too heavy.
Thank you again