Y400 owners! Issues? Concerns? Post em up here!!!

So I've been monitoring my temps since i got my Y400. Mine idles around 50°c, hardcore gaming gets it to high 70's low 80's with spikes up to 90ish, that is the only concern i have about mine, other then that i love it! Gonna try to find a good cooling pad soon, what about everyone else?

 

The SSD I installed in the MSATA port is not being recognized in my y400. Luckily my friend bought the y480 that was sent to me after I cancelled the order so I'll be able to see if the SSD works in his so I know if it's a problem with the SSD or my y400.

As for heat levels, I have no complaints yet, plus I have a cooling pad at my dorm for when I head back to school after the break.

 

Thats it? Not a single other y400 owner can pipe in on this? These are selling like crazy and no one buying them can put their two cents in here? Come on people!!

 

Small update, I got the additional fan, and have the laptop on a targus twin fan chill mat, the targus fans blow directly into a big mesh vent on the bottom of the y400, temps didn't change at all, I checked my BIOS for the turbo boost but I don't have access to that, I remember seeing a thread about how Lenovo has a "locked" BIOS or something, whatev's no big deal, so I went to my power management for now and turned the max processer state to 80%. Since that I haven't seen a temp over 76*C and I've had no lag at all with SWTOR running for pretty much the whole day (6 hours straight at one point) so I guess that will be my fix for right now. Thanks for any info and input guys and gals.

 

What is your ambient temp?
My Y400 idles 40-45C, and gaming is around 70-75C.
You're about 10C higher. I found the additional fan did nothing. It was blowing cool air = not doing much.
I gutted the additional internal fan, and made that ultra slot an air intake using the grill to help cross flow the built in gpu/cpu fan.

 

mine idles in between 40-50, sometimes dipping into the 30's, what kind of games are you playing? maybe swtor is just stressing the machine more then what you've been using, I haven't seen anything over 75* since I lowered the max processer state, and literally no change in performance in game

 

I have had my Y400 for a little over a week now. This thing can get pretty hot in my opinion. I know considering the specs that this is expected, but still. My cpu also idles around 30-50c depending on what is going on in the background. I do have my power management set to 100%. My gaming temps are around 80c for the first 30 minutes with Witcher 2, however they have ramped up to 87c max thus far. I stay around 84c in World of Warcraft. The temps will drop 10 degrees by dropping the power management down as Hcbr929rr2 has stated. The reason for this is that turbo boost is automatically turned off for any setting less than 100%. Of course, most games now do not even need that much power, but it is only clocked at 2.2ghz at 99% with power management. You could try using throttle stop which is a good program, but it might not work very well since this laptop is locked down bios wise.

The sad part is the these new Kepler based cards run super cool. I have only gotten my gpu to max out at 67c while gaming. It stays in the mid 35-40c range idle.

I bought a Coolmaster Notepad x2 Laptop cooler which does almost nothing. It does not affect my cpu, but it drops my gpu down 4c....which I do not really need. It did not phase the cpu in the least bit. This laptop cooler fan ramps up to 1600rpm's as well...

I love everything else about the laptop besides the cpu heat. The back-lit keyboard, it is very light weight for the laptops I am use to (asus g74sx), even the dubbed down 1366x768p monitor looks surprisingly better than expected, and the overall gaming performance will not disappoint. I also got the one with the 16gb ssd for caching purposes. I can start my computer cold boot in roughly 10 seconds. The ssd caching did not make much sense to me until I started using it. It really beefs up the whole system. The 1tb 5400rpm gets about 91mb/s read and 83mb/s write speeds. I have all my main drivers and start up programs set to the ssd which does wonders.

The laptop does have an ultra bay at the cost of losing the dvd drive, but it would be a wall of heat if you put another graphics card in this thing. Overall, the only thing that starts to feel hot is the plastic up by the heatsink and your palm rest for the w,a,s,d hand will get a little above lukewarm. The whole middle and right side of the laptop is ice cool.


Idk, I am worried about the cpu temps, but I might just turn off my turbo boost as well for gaming and leave it on for my other program uses. Truth be told, I did not notice much of a framrate hit for any of my games with it off. Did anyone else besides us have this kind of higher ranged cpu temps with either of the y400 or y500 series laptops? I noticed some did with other forum posts, but I am trying to get as many comments as possible on the issue as a whole.

 

Allow me to correct myself on one thing. If you set the cpu performance in power management to 99% thus turning turbo boost off. You will be capped at a max of 2.35ghz for the cpu. I said 2.2 mistakenly. Most games barely use up to 2.4ghz let alone a quad core. I downloaded Planetside 2 and goofed on it. I hit 90c in 25 minutes of gameplay with turbo boost overclocking itself. It stayed at 75c at 99% with turbo boost now off. A minimal 1-3 fps drop from what I saw. The gpu barely hit 65c...

 

does the cpu overheating issue affect the y500 as well?

 

let me clarify, the CPU has NEVER OVERHEATED the max temp I have seen with everything set to 100% was one spike to 93*C which isn't even high enough for an i7 to throttle, but me being overly anal and overly protective of my new $800 investment doesn't want it to even spike that high lol. What I did was change all the settings on my "balanced" power management setting for when I'm gaming so that my temps will not go over 75*C CPU wise, then i have the settings for "performance" maxed out, for, well, performance lol. I just switch power management settings from the notification tray (like two clicks) right before I play SWTOR, flame what program are you using to monitor temps?

 

Just took delivery of two Y400's at work. I've got two issues right now I'm trying to work thru before I pass final judgement - overall good laptops for the money/hardware but can't recommend just yet. Had to downgrade to Win7 Pro for corporate compatibility - that's been a challenge to get all the drivers, etc., working correctly. My Y400 is going back for a replacement due to this issue: running Prime95 and monitoring temps with CPUZ in about 15 to 20 seconds the CPU cores start to hit 90*C and then it automatically throttles the CPU back down to x24 multiplier = 2.4GHz :-( The other Y400 must have better cooling as it will run thru 2 and a half stress tests before it hits 90* and throttles - the second one will also run PassMark7 without throttling and mine throttles half the time. I've read other posts that infer that lenovo does a poor job with thermal paste application (usually too much)......

The other major issue is with the downgrade to Win7 Pro 64bit, I don't think it is running/utilizing the 16G mSSD rapid drive capability. I tried installing the Intel rapid drive application and it gives an error my hardware does not support it, but it does because it is a factory installed app. So, if someone knows how to enable rapid cache on the mSSD WITHOUT a complete OS reinstall that would be very much appreciated. If my replacement Y400 still has the overheating issue I may try taking it apart and reapplying some TIM properly..... A $1400 laptop with an i7 3630QM processor should be able to run a full speed without overheating!

 

agreed, I think if there is any culprit it is the paste, I just don't want to have my brand new laptop taken apart in the first month that I own it lol but reapplying the paste is definitely on the to do list for me as well

 

I just order my Y400 a few days ago, it should be here by the middle of next week. Anyways I'd like to know what software you guys recommend for monitoring the Y400's temperatures. Also what cooling pad do you recommend.

 

As many others are suggesting the y400 laptops run hot due to the i7 processor. When my company started building i7 desktops we quickly discovered that most i7's (8 thread, turbo) run very hot. The desktop chips were consistently hitting the max and thermal clocking to handle the temps. All chips need aftermarket cooling to run stable. I have not had any temps over 90 deg C. The machine games at about 80 deg C and idles at 40 deg C. Also I opted for the sli (second GT650m). This does not seem to effect the temps since the GPU runs cool around 65 deg C. The second card actual pulls more air across the CPU. Currently the only bad thing about this laptop is the 40 W battery. The sli option requires a 170 w ac power supply so when this is removed the GPUs down clocks to 135 Mhz. I'm not really looking to game on battery but was hoping to still have moderate GPU performance when unplugged.

Y Series Laptop GPU Downclocking to 135 Mhz on Bat... - Lenovo Community
Heres a link to the battery GPU down clocking issue.

Those interested in the sli option. I say go for it. You need the second GPU ($230) and the 170 w ac adapter ($79.99). The game performance is drastically improved. Nvidia suggest a 75% improvement, but in COD Black OPs 2 the frame rate was 2-3 times higher when the second GPU was installed. The frames with all graphics options max are 100-150 fps.

Overall an impressive laptop for the price.

 

do any of you have any issues with wifi access, ive read threads where there are problems with lenovos

 

Here a breakdown for the y400 on youtube if you want to repaste. Doesnt look hard at all maybe 1 hour max from start to finish.

Disassembly - Lenovo Y400 Y500 Full Disassembly - YouTube

Assembly - Lenovo Y400 Y500 Full Assembly - YouTube

 

Hi,

I just got my Y400 today with 16gb ssd as a cache drive.
What is the brand of your 16gb ssd that it comes with?
Mine is Samsung, but i heard that someone has a Sandisk one....
Does lenovo switch the 16gb ssd to a Samsung one from now on?
I also noticed that the transfer rate of my Samsung 16 gb ssd is 3gb/s,
But the transfer rate of the Sandisk 16gb ssd is 6gb/s....
Does this matter when you use it as a cache drive to boost up the 1TB Sata which has a transfer rate of 3gb/s only?

Thanks!

 

I got my Y400 last week immediately replaced the 1TB hdd with a 500GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD, installed Win 7 and had absolutely no issues until this morning. Went to turn the laptop on and it just cycles the lenovo screen. Please see the video below to see the issue:
Lenovo Y400 boot issue - YouTube

The samsung 840 pro is recognized in the boot menu and booting to it from the boot menu does the same thing. Trying to boot into recovery does the same thing too.

 

Why don't you put back the old hdd. If that solves your problem, that means your Samsung ssd failed on you. You can always have it exchanged no matter where you got it from. But try to have it inserted in another system and even if it is not the main boot system, check if it gets recognized in windows. Definitely an issue with your Samsung ssd. It is known that this model has some problems with NVidia cards.