#i love my paving slab thinkpad; but the thermblies...

[tetranymous]

In a strange twist of events that 99% of pc users will never encounter it's looking more and more like I'm actually going to have to DOWNGRADE my cpu.

No matter what I do I CANNOT get the temps down. I've cleaned the vents, cleaned the fan, repasted with the best stuff I could find, changed the power settings, disabled turbo boost, looked into tpFanControl but backing out since it has the potential to brick my BIOS (hasn't been tested to work with my model. Maybe when this isn't my only decent pc), trying lenovo's heat management utilities (vantage was extremely unhelpful and the older versions won't install on win10, they're straight up blocked by the OS despite being signed), and it STILL idles at 80°c at night while only having the hardware monitor open (and maybe doing a maintenance scan in the background). Yes, it's sitting on an additional fan. Yes, I've debloated Win10 and am looking into Linux once I can afford or even find a big enough msata drive for it.

The only things I've yet to try is tinkering with the BIOS (for some reason the f key shortcut when booting doesn't work :/), brute forcing my way through the power manager install (there's a way to do it that I haven't tried yet) and hunting down the xtreme edition cpu manager that actually works (may be a dead end since the thinkpad forums mentioned that you can't unlock the cpu for tweaking). If none of that works my only options are reducing the wattage of the CPU and/or plumbing the thang into extended intake/exhaust pipes, which I can't use if I have to take it anywhere (rare, but if I have an assignment where I have to create a video it's far better at it than my other options).

Worst part is that it WASN'T always this hot, it used to max out at about 70°c, but I can't remember when I got those numbers during winter or not. Most people with this model usually ask about upgrading their CPU, but mine came with the upgraded option, so a lot of the stuff I've found online hasn't been particularly helpful. I guess on the plus side I'll actually get more than an hour on my battery alongside the better temps if I do downgrade (battery is practically flawless with less that 3% capacity loss. Doesn't matter too much since its rarely on battery anyways, I usually just treat it as a desktop with a huge UPS. It would be nice though to get through a whole movie without having to go grab the power brick in the last 25 minutes).

Was really hoping to max out the RAM and put some additional drives in it first, but I really have to deal with these temps before I cook something. Anyways, any fellow toasty thinkpad owners want to weigh in?