Air suction/fan vent on T61

I have a T61 15.4 inch. I cannot figure out the vent that is used to suck air in by the fan. All I can see is that there are two heat outlets....one on the left side and one in the left back side. I can feel the hot air going out of both of them, but I cannot figure out the area that is used to suck the air in. Do you guys know?

 

the main heatsink fan is primarily venting the CPU via some heat grease, intake is from all the other open access vents (just slits throughout the computer)

it is actually a good design since there is not one on the bottom, thus, allowing us to use it on bed tops without overheating the machine

 

This way it 1 fan helps cool the entire machine and no vents on the bottom means it can actually be used as a "laptop".

 

Hey eyecon82, thanks for your reply. What's heat grease?
I see that most of the air slits are on the bottom of the computer, so if I use it on a bed, wouldn't that block the ventilation? Also, will the slits on the bottom pull in more dust from the surface of a bed/sofa? I am worried because my last computer (dell inspiron 6000) developed major ventilation problems due to the blockade of heat vents by dust. and that computer had air suction at the bottom.

 

I believe he is talking about thermal paste that provides a thermal conduit between the surface of the chip to the heatsink itself.

I have a t61p with a 2.6 ghz processor which would be the hottest of the series and my machine seems to run quite cool although I too can feel the heat from the side vent. That's the only detectable warmth on the whole machine and I wouldn't worry about it.

 

I'm curious to see how T61 handles T7800's heat, if you could run Intel Thermal Analysis Tool (TAT) ( http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/392e/tat.exe) for 10-20 min and report the max CPU temperature, it would be great.

 

Now I am totally confused..........

This test was run on AC power.

Ambient processor temp is 56 and I ran both processors at 100%.



The clock speeds instantly dropped down to 1200 Mhz and the temp went up to 63 degrees. I thought this may be a power management issue so I used the Lenovo power management and set the power plan to maximum performance. That made no difference...apply a load and the system drops to 1200 mhz per processor. When the load is removed it returns to 2.6 Ghz.

I love this system but I really get tired of the competing and battling systems in this machine. It's almost schizophrenic.

I'm really tempted to do what phil did and go to 64 bit Vista just to do a clean install. This is ridiculous.

 

I would imagine my battery life will be less than IBM's stretch power management, but I do not see a lot of drops like I used to see with IBM's power manager.

 

Wow phil. I'm glad to see you here. This is really upsetting. What better way to say you have a cool running machine than to drop it down to half speed?

You know, I want to manage my own devices. I don't want all of this done for me. I do like the blue ThinkVantage button and some of the Lenovo stuff.. but this is just getting crazy. Maybe I should just look at removing the power manager. Installs are currently two days of hard work and I'm not looking forward to that propspect.

 

I turned the PM manager off, loss the functionality of my bluebutton. WHen I started the test, there was about a five second latency before the machine went to 1200 mhz. What agent is reducing the processor clock speed? What good does it do to have a 2600 Mhz machine that drops to 1200 Mhz when it's put under load?

 

Supposed intelligent design -- I suppose -- perhaps not so intelligent. I guess this is a topic worth investigating.

 

I have now confirmed this with cpuz. They both say exactly the same thing and the thermal test software does show receiving a commend to go to 1200 mhz. I wonder if this is deliberately a part of the test?

 

OK,

It was the test itself doing that. Instead of running the Intel test, I ran this:

Imports System.threading

Public Class Form1
Private a As New Load
Private b As New Load


Private Sub Form1_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load
Dim newThread As New Thread(AddressOf a.Start)
newThread.Start()
b.Start()
End Sub
End Class

Public Class Load


Public Sub New()
End Sub

Public Sub Start()
Dim a As Int32
For I As Int64 = 0 To System.Int32.MaxValue
a = I * 0.98749898239823
Next
End Sub

End Class


It's .Net program designed to stress a duo core flat out. I made two runs of this and watched my performance monitor which showed that the program absolutely saturated the boh cores as it was designed to do.

In parallel I used intel's thermal monitor to monitor clock speeds. The machine was AC powerful and power management settings were for maximum performance. All instruments concurred with each other it was a textbook stress test.


Results:

Core temperatures assymptoted at approx 69 degress centigrade with as much as a three degree temperature differential between cores so one core was at 66 degrees and the other was at 69 degrees.

Vista Performance:

I included this because it was remarkable. Even though both cores were maxed out with their own looping threads..... time slicing was very smooth and easy. I could do anything I wanted with the system while this test was in progress. I don't believe that XP time slicing was anywhere near that good. Vista is XP grown up.

 

Nice tight code as usual Renee!

 

On my T61p with T7800 my idle temps are 53C on both cores and after running for 10+ minutes temps are 88C and 87C on both cores respectively... seems kinda high to me... ambient room temp is about 72F

I'm running clean install of XP and my clock speeds stay at 2600 throughout the test.

 

Tight r us....

 

I tried the Intel experiment again and achieved the same results except I let it run a long time and eveyonce in a while I could see the program set the clock speed to 2.6 and then quickly set it down again, yet another user reports max clockspeed on XP. I don't understand that.

On my program, the clockspeed was a constant 2.6.

 

you could also try wprime 1024M calculation to get a full load...( http://www.wprime.net/download.html?q=wprime_154.zip)

 

the code I wrote.... consumes all of the compute resources. it really does.

 

can anyone answer his question?

 

please look in the back near the power jack. I believe the fan is in a squirrel cage and the air input is not the slits in the bottom but....the duct beside the power jack.

 

with wprime, in "Advanced Setting", change Thread Count to 2, you will get both core full loaded, while with your code, you could only get 50% load of each core.

 

my code loads both cores fully.

I have a performance monitor that displays both cores simultaneously and the monitor showed the 7800 to be maxed out at 2.6 ghz.

With that code, there's no other way it could be.

 

what are the slits on the bottom for?

 

bump really want to know answer thanks

 

bump again what is the function of the slits on the bottom of the notebook for? does this make it safe to use the T61 anywhere, not just on flat surface?

 

In case you haven't seen this:

It's almost in the middle of the page: http://www.lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?m=200705

 

The T61 does utilize the bottom slits for cooling the notebook, but it is perfectly safe to rest the computer on your lap for example. According to numerous reviews this shouldn't damage or harm your laptop. (When possible though, a flat surface is always better for both stability and cooling)

The only thing I would heed against is sitting the T61P on a surface that could block all the bottom vents, such as a comforter or a sofa. If you sit the T61P on your lap it can still receive ventilation from the bottom slits.

 

Thanks Hackez, this is helpful. But doesn't it mean that the T61 would suck up a lot of dust from the surface it is sitting on (lap, sofa, bed or a dusty table) because the slits are on the bottom? I can see through the slits, some kind of a black polythene (?) layer inside the case at the bottom, is it supposed to stop the dust from getting inside? Thanks again.

 

does that mean this is wrong?

its right on the lenovoblogs

 

You might want to check what Adaptive Thermal Management is set to both in the BIOS and in the TP Power Manager. If they're set to "Balance All Parameters", then this is what's causing the downclocking behavior. This essentially sets the thermal throttle threshold much lower than technically necessary in an attempt to reduce the heat produced, but at the cost of reduced CPU speed. Setting ATM to "Max Performance" (in both the BIOS and TP Power Manager) should return the throttling behavior to stock Intel specs which should not throttle down at such a low temperature.

 

I searched the forum before posting a new thread and thought this might be a good place for my question:

I have a T61 T7500 and quite often the area below the left wrist (underneath laptop) gets warm, actually hot. Not to the extent that one would not be able to touch it but still - VERY warm. Hddtemp says hard-drive temp is 35C; processor is running at 39C... vents barely audible, and still - this area is hot; i cannot pinpoint the location but safest bet would be at the bottom of laptop where WINDOWS key is on keyboard - so, if you lift the laptop and put palm under it...

Any idea what is located there and what maybe causing such heat production? Even better, what can i do to improve temp?

 

If you have WWAN then that may be the cause of the extra warmth as it would be located right around where you described. It could also be the GPU as I believe on the T61 there is some heat transfer to the keyboard base from the GPU thermal assembly, which is also located fairly close to the Windows key.

 

The WLAN and RAM is in the center which can put out some heat. The 4965 cards should be much cooler compared to the 3965 counterpart though. If your running on AC only a lot try removing the battery, that should reduce the heat somewhat.

 

Thank you UltraCow, thank you optomos!

My T61 comes with a X3100, so GPU is out of the question; i get this mostly when I run on battery; I do not have WWAN module, just Atheros wireless card; basically, this leaves one option alone - RAM. I am an enthusiast desktop gamer and have quite a lot of experience with overclocking and performance of RAM modules. I'd have to say, for RAM to produce this much heat, it has to be running 50% or more above factory specs, which of course, is not the case. Should I consider replacing the RAM with new one or approaching the service for warranty replacement? What say you?

Thanks,