Temperature Monitoring on the T60

[Steerpike]

I bought the T60 largely because of the Core Duo processor with it's reported low temperature operation (and associated battery performance). I'm happy to observe that this is the coolest (temperature!) laptop I've ever owned or seen, by a long way. I can feel no heat whatsoever anywhere on the case, just a very slight warmth near the center of the base - but you really have to 'feel' carefully to notice this. By comparison, I've had friends burn their legs with other laptops, and I've stopped putting my Dell Latitude Pentium M-based laptop on my sofa for fear of damaging the leather.

I will note that I have the T60 and not the T60P - my understanding is the T60P has better graphics, and probably runs hotter as a result.

While removing the palm-rest and keyboard, and I noticed a large amount of copper, for both heatsinks and heatpipes; I'm guessing this contributes to the good heat dissipation (my Dell uses only a small amount of copper, using instead a lot of aluminum or other 'silver' metal).

Is there a program that would tell me the temperature of the CPU, memory, HD, etc on the T60? On my desktops, I run various programs for this (Motherboard Monitor, HD Temp, Speedfan, etc) and on my Dell, I run a dell-specific utility (ik8fangui) but most of these either don't work at all, or only report very limited temps and may not be accurate, on the T60. The 'Speedfan' program, interestingly, reports two temperatures but does not identify what they are (CPU, GPU, DIMM, HD, etc) and they are suspiciously high given the observations above (49 and 55C - my Dell reports a CPU of 32, GPU 38, DIMM 43 yet it 'feels' a lot hotter).

Anyway - just wondering if anyone knows of a utility to display temps with some accuracy.

[gator]

You can use Notebook Hardware COntrol (NHC). It is free, availble here:
http://www.pbus-167.com/

[Steerpike]

Great tip - thanks! Nice, feature-rich monitor ... I'll play with it more over the next few days. Interestingly, it's showing a CPU temp of 42C, while 'Speedfan' is showing 45C.

Of all things, this utility can't seem to read the HD temp .... several other utilities can read this. Does your installtion (assuming you use this program) show HD temp?

Here's a super-simple HD temp-only monitoring program: http://private.peterlink.ru/tochinov/download.html

[jdhurst]

Mobile Meter reads both CPU temperature and HD temperature and shows speed, but is basic and doesn't do a lot else. ... JD Hurst

[Steerpike]

Nice little program! Any idea what the first two temperatures are? The 'help' suggests that the first one is probably the CPU, the second one is either Video or chipset. The third and last is labeled as 'HD', so that's obvoius !:)

[jdhurst]

My version (0.3.1) shows Frequency (CPU Speed), Temperature (CPU Temperature), Charge Rate (Battery) and Hard Drive temperature.

So right now, I show 600MHz (correct), 37 degrees C (nice and cool), no charging (battery already charged) and hard drive at 29 C (very cool 7200 rpm drive). ... JD Hurst

[Steerpike]

Interesting! I have the same version, and it shows Frequency, Temperature, Temperature, Charge Rate, and HDD #0 (those are the actual labels). So I have an extra temperature. This is on a T60 with Core Duo.

Shockingly, my values right now (on wall power) are: 1.83GHz, 58C, 67C, 0.00W, and 32C respectively! I looked in task manager and sure enough, 'winword' is consuming a steady 47% and my outlook is not responding (typical microsoft fun and games, nothing to do with thinkpad). Looking at the processor charts in task manager, I can see one CPU is close to 100% while the other is not. There is a small chance that the two temps are for the two cores ... I DID apply the 'dual core' patch for the utility.

Anyway, I killed that runaway winword process, and my temps dropped down to 46C and 59C; (1 hour later) - 45C, 45C - stable!