I have just got my X61 for a few days, some problems immediately concern me.
The first thing I noticed after running it for a few hours was that, the fan never stopped spinning! My machine comes with a Core 2 Duo T7500 2.20Ghz CPU. I have already set "Optimize fan control" to "Balance all parameters" and the fan never stops, even when the machine is in idle with the lowest CPU speed.
I did a search on forum.thinkpads.com and I found that many people have the same problem with their X61 and X61s too. The general solution is to turn to a program called tpfancontrol written by one of the forum members there. The program allows us to override BIOS fan control and set thredshold for when the fan kicks in. It works, but the problem is that even at the lowest fan setting allowed by the program, namely "1" ("0" is off), the fan is spinning at 3207 rpm and that is quite noisy.
I am a graduate student and I spend most of my time in my office (shared with other people) and in the library. The level of fan noise this machine generates will certainly disturb me and my colleages.
The second problem is about speedstep. Since I want to prevent the fan from spinning all the time, the first thing I did was to try to reduce the heat output when I am just serfing around and checking email. I installed the latest version of CPU-Z to monitor my CPU clock. I noticed that setting the CPU speed to "low" and "lowest" have no difference. Both setting clock my CPU speed to around 1596.5 MHz, with a multiplier of 8.0 and Bus speed 199.6 MHz. However, if I set CPU speed to "adaptive", my CPU can be clocked as low as 1197.5MHz, with a multiplier of 6.0 and Bus speed 199.6 MHz when it is in idle. Why can't I lower the multiplier to 6.0 and achieve a clock speed of 1197.5 MHz when I set the speed mode to "low" or "lowest" (and why are the two modes the same?)
I have already downloaded the latest drivers and all the thinkvantage updates. My questions and suggestions are:
(1) What is happening in speedstep? Why "low" and "lowest" are the same? And why "adaptive" can achieve a clock speed and multiplier lower than "lowest"?
(2) Fan problem, as noted above. It is a pity that we have to turn to a 3rd party program to solve the fan noise problem. Lenovo should add more flexible fan control functions to Power Manager.
(3) How can I set my fan to run at a speed between off and 3207 rpm? I am using tpfancontrol to set my fan level to "1" when the CPU temperature reaches 55C, and off below that. What happens is that: 0 rpm -> heat builds up -> 55C, 3207 rpm -> after 10 seconds, cooled down -> 0 rpm -> heat builds up -> 55C, 3207 rpm ...and so on. The 3207 rpm is certainly no a pleasant sound in a quiet room.
billbolton
