Re-pasting my ThinkPad X280 for the first time since I got it a few years ago.

Curious to see how well the thermal paste held up. I’m also curious if it running hot has been a thermal paste issue, or simply an Intel chipset issue.

I’m pretty confident that the Intel 8th gen chips didn’t stay very cool in general.

It’s pretty wild how much AMD has been kicking ass in both desktop and mobile spaces for a while. My partner’s Ryzen 5 5500U-based laptop can play Farming Sim with its integrated graphics at a pretty steady framerate while staying cooler than either of my ThinkPads with an 8th gen Intel chip.

Only three years difference between 8th gen Intel and the Ryzen 5 5500U

Meanwhile, my ThinkPad X280 struggles to play Peglin with a steady framerate while on the “Balanced” power profile.

I still laugh at Intel’s snarky comment way back about “Oh, AMD’s just gluing more cores together to be competitive”

Then Intel had to do the same thing after AMD’s IPC and general performance became a lot more competitive with the Zen uArch.

I mean, as far as my understanding goes, Coffee Lake (8th gen) is basically more Kaby Lake (7th gen) cores on the same die.

Wow, the thermal paste was still goopy!

Well, now I’ve gotta re-do it anyway.

@maddy
well, which farm sim your talking about is varying amounts of impressive
25 requires a supercomputer
22 is about standard for a 2021 game
19 and earlier could probably be run on a potato

@SeaDonut In this case, I’m talking about 22, which definitely wouldn’t run nicely on my X280. :p

@maddy depends on what you compare it to

I have a ThinkPad T480s (i5-8350U, default 15W TDP increased to 30W) and a ThinkPad T440p (i7-4700MQ, 47W TDP) and the T480s idles at 20-30°C with the fan completely off (and rarely throttles under load) while the T440p idles at 60-70°C (and will reach 100°C and throttle quite quickly) and the fan never completely switches off

(Both are also undervolted, the T480s by -100mV and the T440p by -75mV. Also T480s almost certainly has better cooling than the X280 (it always has the dual heatpipe which only the dGPU models of the T480 have))