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    x300 fan question

    Discussion in 'Lenovo' started by dapko, Jan 8, 2009.

  1. dapko

    dapko Newbie

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    Hi all,

    Just got a brand new x300 last week. It's running xp, and am reasonably satisfied with it - love the weight/durability/form factor/ssd/speakers, am underwhelmed with the screen (I returned a Sony Z), but what I'm really disappointed about is the fan noise -

    I came home, booted directly into BIOS, and as I was going through my BIOS settings, (3-4 minutes) the fan kicked in (level 3/5000 rpm) When I booted into XP, the first thing I did was run TPFancontrol, and the processor was already up to 50C! I'm fine with trading speed for a quiet computing experience, so I've lowered the Thinkpad power scheme to "lowest" Maximum CPU speed, "balance all parameters" and enabled "CPU deeper sleep" for battery as well as AC settings. With these settings, "My Computer" tells me that my processor is running at 789 MHz, but even just browsing the web, and with an avg. CPU usage of 10%, the temperature creeps up to 49 and fan kicks up to level 2 at around every 5 minutes! Is this normal?

    According to TPFancontrol, it looks like fan level 1 is always on - is this true of everybody's X300? Is there any way I can underclock the processor even more? Is Lenovo developing a BIOS that will set an intermediary RPM of 3500? It seems odd that the speed jumps from 2000 to 5000 RPM (I know others have mentioned this before, but I just wanted to second the motion).

    The only other thing I have done is installed an additional 2Gig of RAM. Could that be contributing this much to the heat? According to TPFancontrol, all other temperatures are under 40C. I'm concerned because my 5 year old X41 ran much, much cooler, (between 35-40c when running at slowest settings) and that was without any fan on at all! I'm concerned that the fan on my X300 will be the first thing to go after a few years if it is on 100% of the time. Or is this the norm, being that this is such a thin machine? The crazy thing is that I was able to get the Sony Z running quieter, and that had a 2.6 ghz processor in a machine almost the same size!

    Thanks for any comments / ideas!
     
    dapko, Jan 8, 2009
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  2. Bashar

    Bashar Notebook Evangelist

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    it happens with me on ubuntu linux but didnt think same issue happens on winxp

    i have vista but no full speed fan running like ubuntu linux

    i do control the speed on ubuntu if i dont use it much
     
    Bashar, Jan 8, 2009
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