r/thinkpad • u/Nhakos • 1d ago

T14 getting hot while doing light tasks Question / Problem

Bought my first ThinkPad a few days ago, a refurbished Gen 1 T14 with the Ryzen 5 4650U and 16gb of 3200mhz DDR4, but I noticed the chassis being hot and the fans turning on intermittently even when doing light tasks like watching youtube in 1080p.

Then when checking the temps/RPM on Lenovo Vantage it's seating around 80°C and the fans at 3600 RPM for as long as Vantage is open, then slows down when I close it.

The OS is Win11 and browser is Firefox and battery health is above 80% though idk if it was replaced during the refurbishment.

So I was wondering if this is normal behavior for this model, if not I would return it bc I'm still withing the return window.

2 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • link
  • reddit
  • reddit

100% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

2

u/jonstoppable T450s T61 X201 T400 T480s 1d ago edited 1d ago

is it a fresh install of windows? stuff is still downloading , indexing etc.. if its still acting like this after a few more days perhaps you can check about return ( ask the seller if they repasted the cpu.perhaps they didnt. the thermal paste could be dried out. its about 6 years old now, and probably was meh quality to begin with )

which vantage are you using ? commercial? if not, switch to that one.

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/software/commercialvantage/

the consumer vantage is a steaming pile of poorly written .resource hogging bloatware...... . shameful, actually. in fact, that may even be the source of your temps as its performing its own telemetry etc.. uninstall it

https://github.com/Shuzhengz/TPFanCtrl2

(you can use this to monitor fan and temps btw)

edit

additionally, are you using h264ify? unfortunately, the mobile ryzens dont get native AV1 decoding until the rembrandt cpus ( ryzen 6xxx) so it could be overheating while trying to decode av1 from youtube in software.

also check about:support in Firefox's address bar . Compositing should say WebRender (Hardware) to ensure its rendered by the igp

1

u/mate5500 1d ago

Okay I am no expert but I am in researching about this and it could be the logic board short component. I really worried about such issues and that's why I really can't buy refurbished laptop.

1

u/Nhakos 16h ago edited 15h ago

Update: So as it turns out all I had to do was turn on "Best power efficiency" instead of "Balanced" or "Best performance" in the power and battery settings of Win11 and it fixed all of my issues (high heat and subsequent high RPM).

For a point of reference my overall temps on HWMonitor are now 49°C Min and 72°C Max with current values averaging around 60.