Lenovo Thinkpad laptop fans run wild! Any advice?

Rhino Windows Hardware
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Hello, when my Lenovo Thinkpad P15 is plugged in and Rhino is open the fans constantly run. Even when I am not preforming any tasks in Rhino. As soon as I quit out of Rhino the fans quiet down. I can understand if the fans are running when preforming heavy tasks. But, as I’ve stated just simply having a Rhino file open causes the fans to run.

I have the power slider set to Better Performance. When I slide the slider to Better Battery the fans quiet which makes sense.

The thing that doesn’t make sense is it seems that simply having a Rhino file open and not preforming any tasks causes the laptop fans to spike.

Specs
Nvidia 2080 Super Max Q
Intel Xeon - W-10855

Has anyone encountered something similar with their Lenovo product? Thanks for the help.

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This is not a Rhino thing. The graphics cards 2080 etc need a lot of cooling and when you put them in a thin laptop you get noisy fans. Its the price you pay for great cards in thin devices. Same happens to me with an MSI using 2080 on most 3D software.

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Have you followed this?
Fan runs at a higher than expected speed - Windows - ThinkPad, ThinkCentre, ideapad, ideacentre - Lenovo Support GB

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As MIchael said, this is the price you pay for a powerfull graphic card (so far): fan noise!
very annoying
I own a p53 with a rtx5000 and the same goes here. Lenovo technical support said that this was expected (asked when laptop was brand new).
I manually reduce windows performance settings when not working on demanding tasks. Noise cancellation earphones helps also ;)l

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One option is to take out battery and use laptop with a cable for more permanent work.
Batteries tend to heat up quite a lot, requiring constant cooling.

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It is neither a Rhino nor Lenovo thing, it is Nvidia. For some reason they set Rhino’s power management to “high performance”. You can go to nvidia control panel to change it to “Nvidia driver-controlled”.

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This solved my fan issue, thanks!

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In my opinion, the most important laptop spec is its cooling power in watts. Laptop vendors do not provide this information because laptop users do not understand how important cooling is. Lenovo ThinkPad P15 Gen 2 is good example of this problem. It has very powerful CPU and GPU, but…

The cooling system is chunky with dual fans and a plethora of heat pipes, but the laptop still runs hot and throttles up to 20% under full load. Those two fans are also quite loud when spun up, hitting between 50 and 60 decibels at full tilt. source: Lenovo ThinkPad P15 (Gen 2) review: Outdated looks hide high-end workstation performance and features | Windows Central

Thermal design power (TDP)… is the maximum amount of heat generated by a computer chip or component (…CPU or GPU…) that the cooling system in a computer is designed to dissipate under any workload. source: Thermal design power - Wikipedia

Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that buying powerful laptop is a waste of money. You can reduce its fan noise by forcing its CPU and GPU to run slowly (throttle), but it seems more rational to buy slow, cheap laptop instead.

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Or a cheap pair of earmuffs…. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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The fans will run faster if a program is actively using the GPU.

Though, you might check the nVidia Control Panel settings, and set your power management to Adoptive, or Normal. If it is in High Performance, the responsiveness will be better, but they GPU will generally not get a chance to cool down enough to be free from thermal soak enough to handle bursty work.

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Also, I suspect that the Performance slider affects the CPU. Even if they have 2 fans and two heatsinks, most Lenovo computers’s heatsinks are joined in the center, to handle asymmetrical thermals loads. I recommend putting the CPU on medium, better performance, but not Best.

What I try to do: Give both the GPU and CPU a chance to cooperate with the allowed cooling capacity.

It also might help to prop up the back edge of your computer. I do not recommend laptop coolers with fans, because the airflow might go the wrong way, staving the laptop with air.

Also, you have the fastest Quad that Lenovo put in a computer, at the time. Are you sure that you have a 2080? Generally, Lenovo uses Quado chips in their P series, which have nearly but not entirely Geforce equivalents. Notwithstanding, the fact that you have a MaxQ, means that you have more GPU than cooling, so Adoptive cooling profiles help.

Also, nVidia has new drivers–every month.

I have a Lenovo P15 Gen 2. Firstly, for good battery life, I need to do a reinstall. I hope they aren’t mining in the background.

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ThinkPad P1 Gen 5 has sophisticated, liquid metal cooling system, but it cannot remove all internal heat. ThinkPad P1 Gen 5 review says: The cooling solution simply can’t keep up with the power limits that Lenovo configured from the factory for the CPU; without limiting power to a more-reasonable 70-80W, the 12800H instantly hit 100°C and throttled down to protect itself in Cinebench R23. source: Reddit - Dive into anything

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Vapor chamber cooling is more efficient than water cooling, as it can transfer more heat per unit of area. Greater efficiency enables vapor chamber cooling laptops to keep their components cooler, even under heavy load… Another benefit of vapor chamber cooling laptops is that they are much quieter than their air-cooled counterparts because the closed-loop liquid cooling system doesn’t require any fans to operate… You can expect to pay anywhere from $100 to $300 more for a vapor chamber cooling laptop than for a traditional air-cooled model. source: What Is a Vapor Chamber Cooling Laptop? Do You Need One?

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Heat pipes contain no mechanical moving parts and typically require no maintenance… In a standard heat pipe, the condensed liquid is returned to the evaporator using a wick structure exerting a capillary action on the liquid phase of the working fluid… The advantage of heat pipes over many other heat-dissipation mechanisms is their great efficiency in transferring heat. A pipe one inch (2.54cm) in diameter and two feet (61cm) long can transfer 3.7kW at 980°C with only 10°C drop from end to end… Vapor chambers… are flat heat pipes… With special evaporator wicks, vapor chambers can remove… 700W over 1cm^2… Another major usage of vapor chambers is for cooling purposes in gaming laptops. source: Heat pipe - Wikipedia

ThinkPad P16 Gen 2 (ThinkPad P16 G2) has vapor chamber cooling. https://thinkstation-specs.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/P16-Gen-2-Lenovo-ThinkStation.pdf

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Respectfully, all the vapor-chamber cooling isn’t going to help–if the fan is too small.

In my Lenovo P15 Gen 2, the air the comes from the vent is hot. The heat is indeed being transferred to the heatsink and to the air. There are enough fins. There isn’t enough airflow. The fans should be nearly twice the size. This is partially the fault of gamers who accept their GPUs throttling under load, and the rest is my/our fault.

I have already killed a fan in a 1-year old Lenovo P15 Gen 2. It has gone in for service.

When will anyone learn that we need more cooling for real-time rendering and rendering in general?

It angers me to no end that I have a desktop for rendering. For the love of money, why cannot I have a laptop that can render day after day, like my desktop can? Why do I have to worry about my laptop overheating? The difference: cooling and airflow.

The fans need to be larger. Lenovo and likely HP and MSI as well, are still laboring under the delusion that CAD/Design are part-time GPU loads–when in fact, they are worse than gaming.

Also, I would have bough a faster GPU–IF there was cooling to warrant it, but there wasn’t. In my Gen 2, every GPU higher than a A3000 were hobbled, so I just bought the RTX Quadro A3000, which is nearly a RTX Geforce 3060 (mobile). Oddly, although it’s last-gen it’s a great laptop chip. It renders faster than my desktop’s aging GTX 1080 or the AMD 3900x it’s attached to.

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I am big fan of your posts and I am going to blow hot air. :wink:

Laptop cooling pads have been on the market for quite some time, but they’re not the best you can get. Vacuum cooling fans work on a unique principal (principle?). By attaching to the air outlet, they are able to suck air through at a higher velocity than your stock cooling system. Some of these systems have boosted cooling performance by a significant margin. source: 3 Best Laptop Vacuum Cooling Fans in 2023 - Nerd Techy

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Thank you for pun : )

The only thing I worry about with pulling more air into the laptop: there is a slight possibility of overvolting the PWM in the fan controller–on the motherboard/planar. In other words, while it’s unlikely to damage anything, it is possible that pulling the fan faster than what it would normally do could generate a voltage higher than the motherboard fan controller might like.

I had contemplated designing a bottom for my computer, using 2 of 80mm-120mm fans. Really, a squirrel-cage fan would be…hot!

Though, seeing that product you linked makes me think about using a 80mm in a chimney kind of thing hooking up to the sides.

Really, what it needs is a system, whereas you snap the computer down into a dock, and it electrically disconnects both fans, and it has fans in it. Lenovo already sells docks, so why not a cooling one. It’s still more practical than the dry-break liquid cooling rig I saw a few years ago on Linus’s channel.

At the house, I use a upside-down mesh letter tray. I also designed some feet for the P15 Gen2: Lenovo P15 / P17 Gen2 Cooling Stands by BrendaEM - Thingiverse

I find that even lifting the latoptop from the table will help because air doesn’t like to might right-angle turns, and also, the heat soaks into the table otherwise from the radiant heat coming from the bottom of the computer. The P15 Gen 2 has a carbon-filled polyamide bottom, and I am sure they wouldn’t have spec’ed that if it weren’t for heat issues.

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Dell Precision 7680 is another new (March 2023) CAD laptop which has the vapor chamber cooling. Its review says: We noticed some throttling in long loads, which is not good… Battery life is really short. We are talking about three hours of very light use. source: https://laptopmedia.com/review/dell-precision-16-7680-review-overheating-and-underdelivering-on-battery-life/p8/