Thinkpad L 15 gen 2 advice

[Karl Auer]

On Sun, 2022-05-22 at 14:59 +1000, Phil wrote:
> I just did a quick test. At room temperature the CPU temperature was
> 78 degrees (that's Celsius) and the fan speed was 3880 RPM. After
> watching an 8 minute YouTube video the CPU temperature rose to 92
> degrees and the fan was running at 4494 RPM.

Well, that's good - the fan is increasing in speed to cope with the
increased heat. And the CPU temperature decreases when it stops
working, also an indication that the cooling system is doing its job. 

It seems to me that everything is working as it should, you are just
getting surprisingly hot air vented from a surprisingly hot CPU. It may
or may not be an actual problem, depending on what the rated operating
temperature range of that CPU is.

CPU temperatures much over about 85 are generally considered "high"
though.

> One thing that I haven't done is replace the thermal past on the
> CPU, however, since the heat at the vent is almost hot enough to boil
> water I don't think new paste would help.

The fan cools the heat sink, not the CPU directly, and the thermal
paste just gets heat out of the CPU into the heat sink. Since the
vented air is hot, the heat must be getting out of the CPU OK, so the
thermal paste is probably not the problem, but it never hurts to
replace it.

You could try a software solution or two. You may be able to get that
fan speed higher with software. And you could try running cpulimit on
the process that is displaying your youtube video.

Or go really lo-tech - buy a cheapo tablet and use that to watch videos
on :-) 

Regards, K.

-- 
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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer

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