Is it possible to disable (remove) ATI Video in a T60?

I have a T60 that I have running 24/7 to monitor a weather station and the ATI chip is overheating. On really hot days it will run fine until I reboot it, it gets stuck right when loading graphics driver. If I wait a few minutes and let it cool it will boot fine.

I tried some time back to cut down on Fan use (so the laptop would last) and the first thing to get too hot is the ATI chip. I gave up on that because the ATI chip just got too hot.

It is completely cleaned.

I don't need the ATI Chip.

If I remove it, would it just switch to the embedded graphics one or does that need a different cable for the display?

 

If your T60 uses ATI chip, it likely has 945PM chipset, which does not have onboard graphics, and T60 does not support switchable graphics. You could swap in a GMA 950 motherboard into your T60..

 

you dont have embedded graphics. If you remove the GPU the laptop will most likely not even boot, or in another strange case it might boot (highly doubt it) but you wont see anything.

on the bright side - there's a program called TPFanControl that you can download for free and use to control the speed on your fan, i.e. increase it as needed.

on another bright side - there's various programs that you can use to downclock the GPU so that it wont become as hot, such as RivaTuner.

and yet on some other bright side - there's programs that let you undervolt the CPU, and because both CPU and GPU sit on one heat sink, you decrease the temp of one and it affect the other. Such programs are ThrottleStop (I recommend) and RMClock.

of course if you have the time you could open the laptop and repaste the CPU and the GPU chips so that those have better thermal contact to the heat sink, thus to help dissipating the temps easier.

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now, how do you monitor a weather station ? .... just curious

 

You monitor a weather station with software like this

WeatherLink Software with data logging feature for Vantage Pro 2 Serial - Davis Vantage Pro2 Weather Station Accessories from Davis Instruments

I've played with throttling and what not on the T60 and had dreadfull results. Blue Screens etc. Part of it might be is Windows 7 is really pushing things on a T60 but I hate running XP.

I tried the TPFanControl and it started over heating as soon as I cut back on the fan at all. And it's that darn ATI chip that is over heating. CPU was fine.

 

With a notebook that is around six years old(IIRC) and has seen that sort of use for an indeterminable amount of time, I think it might be time for a repaste job. If you want to get more involved, you can modify your heat sink for a bit better contact with the GPU, allowing you to actually use thermal paste on it(instead of a thermal compound pad) which will further reduce temps. This is an old thread I posted on another ThinkPad site with ideas for doing the modification on a T60/p I once had. Lots of good info: forum.thinkpads.com • More questions about T60/p heatsinks...

 

Apart from re-applying thermal paste which is an excellent piece of advice, you may want to try Notebook Hardware Control and underclock your GPU.

 

Thanks for the tips on re-applying Thermal Paste but you won't believe this.

I posted about this a while back.

The sysem was running fine until one day a Windows Update came in (for the ATI Graphics) and since then is has been problematic.

At soon as it rebooted it hung on the Windows Animated Logo (one Red dot).

So after a lot of playing around I managed to get the original driver on there and turns out I had it in C:\ATI (ugh).

That old driver was a "Desktop" X1300 driver.

But it was "overheating". It would run fine but if it rebooted (when warm) it would hang on that animation logo.

I let it cool for 1 minute and it would boot fine, every tie. Been running like this 24/7 for months.

I also use it for Music training tools (MIDI Composer and MP3 slowdown) both take a fair bit of processing and were not running very well.

The reason I upgraded my normal laptop was because of this being a tad slow.

So I finally caved in and moved my 1 year old T420 in and would us the T60 as a "beater" at work and ordered a new T430s.

I had an old 64GB SSD kicking around and thought I'd toss it in the T60 to make it somewhat more usable.

Everything went smooth as silk and I saw that infamous Optional Lenovo Display Update that I deffered until all other updates were done.

EVERY time it rebooted it hung, try again immediate hang, wait one minute it would boot fine.

This with no Lenovo drivers of any kind.

Then I came to the conclusion that the Windows Update had nothing to do with the first video hang and it was all overheating issues (by the way it is well blown out).

So I figured what the heck I'll let the update run.

IMMEDIATELY I felt cool air comming out the side without even rebooting. I had been in a reclinering while configuring it and my left hand is near the hot exhaust vent hot air pooring out the whole time.

Rebooted it, NO HANG from over heating. tested again and again.

It boots blazing fast with the SSD, runs cool now and no hangs.

So what's wierd is that old hacked desktop driver AND the stock Windows 7 driver both would cause it to overheat.

My guess is both these were running in "Non Mobile" ATI X1300 mode.

The driver update was a true Mobile driver.

The latest driver which I think is April this year (maybe last year), very new for such an old laptop, works perfect.

I did not install a single Lenovo driver and it's running great.

Now I'm wondering with that heat (over driving ATI chip) issue if the CPU was throttling back which caused the Music software to stutter sometimes. UGH.

 

Wow 25 seconds from Cold boot to logged in.