W520 with SSD - Fan noise

[Martin_Smith]

What does "quite a bit" mean? Are you happy with it now?

[rickshaw]

Since this is an old thread I was wondering if the fan noise an issue is mostly with earlier W520's (running SSDs)?

Mine is stock (except  for the 12 gb additional RAM) that I bought las month. Itruns very quiet in Optimus mode, both on battery and plugged in whilerunning under heavy loads.

I am considering upgrading to SSD (replace main bay drive) but would rather stay with the current hard drive if SSD results in heat issues thus louder fan noise.  If this were the case, I would just add an mSata module and keep the stock drive.

thanks

[Martin_Smith]

I bet that you just need to upgrade the BIOS to version 1.26 irrespective of W520 configuration.

See: http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithcombs/archive/2011/07/27/sandy-bridge-turbo-boost-and-thermals-notes....

I wonder if Lenovo released BIOS upgrades with fan noise improvement also for other models such as the L520 and T520.

[harrisb]

Respectfully, you need to upgrade to BIOS 1.34

[ThorsHammer]

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harrisb wrote:
Respectfully, you need to upgrade to BIOS 1.34

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Harrisb is correct.  The blog post reference has good information but it was written back in July before the throttling issues were corrected in 1.33 and 1.34.

Also, I am adding the blog post URL again to see if this forum software is mangling it.  See http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithcombs/archive/2011/07/27/sandy-bridge-turbo-boost-and-thermals-notes...

[Martin_Smith]

Of course, the latest BIOS version is usually a good idea. I was more concerned with the fan noise that must have been addressed already in the 1.26 version. How is the fan running now on the W520? Any problems? I assume that any pulsing has been solved but is the fan running constantly and is it noisy on low levels? (Do you know the status for T520 and L520?)

[unit88888888]

I can tell you that the fan for the t510 is constantly on and it is blowing out hot air. I am going to be replacing this laptop with a w520 soon...or the w530 if i wait till 2013 year to come by...though I am not sure if there are going to be any major improvements because I can safetly say that I had a better experience on the t500 in every way possible than with the t510...

[ColonelONeill]

Well, if it's blowing out hot air, then something is producing heat. If something's hogging the CPU unnecessarily, then that heat would need to be dissipated.