Lenovo ThinkPad W520 thermal shutdown

[gMALI]

Hi, I am using a Lenovo ThinkPad W520 and the strange thing that I have noticed is like I experienced thermal shutdown, thrice a day and was not able to figure out why this is happening. The thing is like I was just playing a audio file with the running game and after certain time it just shutdown, sp is this because of any particular application or because of some faulty hardware, please help me resolving this before it damages some hardware from the machine.

[Huron]

well, on several controllers a thermal sensor is fixed or can be fixed as an alternative to identify the MOSFET heat and decrease the obtainable current if the heatsink overheats. And if suppose that controllers fails to do that it just shutdowns the machine in order to prevent the hardware damage. So you have to first of all check whether the temperature is proper or getting high as you run any application. And according to that you should apply any solution to keep it cool.

[Illinois]

simply I would say the problem is the overheating that you are having with your laptop, so you can have two option as you can set the settings from the BIOS for the fan speed, or I think you need to put some thermal compound material on your heatsink and after applying that you’ll get proper cooling in your machine and the laptop won’t shutdown every time.

[Huron]

If the surface that generally causes heat is not damaged then you can have solution by just setting up the fan speed as well. But if that surface is damaged you need to fix it first of all before it damages other hardware. Or else as mentioned by the above user you can have option to apply such a material on the processor as well as the heatsink, and be careful while applying such a material or it may turn to damage hardware, so at this moment if you don’t have sufficient knowledge about this you should hire a technician rather do the same in expert surveillance.

[Delaware]

I was also having the same problem with my laptop, and this was completely because of the driver that I was using. You might be wonder that how driver can cause this, but still when we didn’t use proper drivers with the particular hardware it generally cause the CPU utilization very higher, and because of that the hardware gets warm after sometime it leads to affect the functioning or the machine.

[Beothuk]

I am agree with the above user as you should first of all get all the proper drivers, and the essential thing is like we must have to have suitable BIOS as well in the machine in order to set other hardware’s functionality, and for your laptop I think the latest BIOS is 1.26 version, so my recommendation is to have this BIOS in your machine first and then see whether the same is happening or not.

[switchblade327]

Your shutdown difficulty appears to be mainly caused by the GPU. The processor might overheat as well, but this wouldn't cause a system shutdown until it Exceeds the limit. You can have option to put a thermal material on the processor or you can simply add a new cooler in you machine to keep it cool, but if you keep running the machine in the same situation them surely it may cause some addition problem for sure.