And so I send a CF-31 to heartland

That is right, I RMAed a CF-31 because my CPU was overheating.

What does that mean? within 30 seconds of stress testing (Prime95) the CPU reaches 105 C, at this point the CPU throttles its performance so it does fry up.

This is really a shame because the nice thing about the i5 is that it can overclock itself, dynamically. Well that big selling point is completely negated in the CF-31 as it overheats when it does so.

what a shame.

So I send it in to heartland, they will fix my laptop right.

wrong.

Just got off the phone with the Panasonic engineers and they told me that the unit was running within specs.

Within specs? 105 C... no!

Well he corrects himself and said that with the particular stress test I included (Prime 95) the unit does reach 105 C after 30 sec. Which he then assured me is completely normal because they ran it on other units that they had and they overheated too.

Great! So heartland can't fix my problem because my laptop is not defective.

A HUGE design flaw on part of Panasonic, which I might have expected from any company other then the makers of the legendary tough-book.

I am deeply disappointing and would urge everybody to stay away from the CF-31s until they have fixed this issue.

Mind you: the CF-31s overheat in ideal conditions that is 62 - 66 F room temp. I can't imagine this Laptop holding up at all in the desert.

 

Is there a fan in this model , and if so have you monitored the fan speed

 

yes it has a fan, and yes it works.

The interesting part is that it never spins at full speed. It seems like the only temperature control that is going on here is the CPU throttling back.

Again Panasonic assured me that this is the case with each and every CF-31.

 

I have a CF-31 at work...will check with mine as well!

 

And that's with the intel graphics? Wow. You really don't want to know how much more heat the discrete graphics add. My fan gets busy at idle with the ATI on.

 

The boys who build PCs for use in recording studios are VERY fan speed conscious and highly recommend a program for temperature and fan speed measurements and actually remote controlling the speeds of many OEM fans. I just use it for temp monitoring and it seems to work well. More info at:
SpeedFan - Access temperature sensor in your computer

 

that isn't the problem, the problem is that the heat is not being transferred from the CPU to the housing.

 

The SpeedFan program does not recognize the fan on the CF-31.

I wanted to try it to force the fan to run full speed, but no luck.

 

I know there was a problem with the heat sync in only the high end model 31, the CF-31ATN (i5-540 processor), not the i5-520 or i3. I also hear it was on select CF-31ATN's and not all of them.

 

well, hmm. i guess i'll just have to take the 31 off your hands then.

 

On the ones made before May has the problem. After that month, they corrected it.

 

yea but I am talking about the i5-520. But again Panasonic does not see the CPU overheating as a "problem".