zBook 17 Overheating

[VenB]

I have a new zBook 17 which behaves strange.  On the docking station it runs fine.  When I take it out of docking station, the laptop heats up fast (fan does not work) and the graphics card temperatures reach ~90 °C within 30 minutes (whether on battery or on power - but not docked).  If I return the hot laptop back to the dock, the fan kicks in immediately and the tempertaure drops to 35 °C or so.  This doesn't appear to be a hardware issue, because I changed the mother board, graphics card, heat sink, fan, and eventually went for a new laptop into which I swapped the old hard drive.  The problem still remains on the new laptop indicating some driver conflict with BIOS fan control or similar issue.  Updated the BIOS and Display driver to latest versions, but no use.

Did anybody face similar issue and anyone has any suggestion?  Basically I can't use the laptop off the docking station for more than 30 minutes!  Some Specs below - Thanks in advance

zBook 17; Win 7; NVidia Quadro K3100M; Dual HP monitors when docked connected to DVI and Display ports;  Regular 17" laptop display when undocked, Micorsoftw Wireless keyboard and Mouse

[VenB · Accepted solution]

So, I finally figured out what the problem was.  Believe it or not, it was the GPU monitor widget (gadget) that I was using to measure the temperature that was causing the probelm. The widget somehow was disabling the fan. If I uninstall the widget and stop monitoring the GPU temeprature, the laptop works just fine!!  Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, LOL.

This behavior was with ANY kind of GPU widget I used., I tried 'GPU Monitor' , 'GPU Observer', 'GPU meter', and with all of them the NVIDIA card showed the same behavior.  So finally I  diabled the GPU widget and now just rely on my palm to test the temperature, and I never felt any excessive heat even after prolonged operation.

I can still use a CPU monitoring widget, but have no problem at all.  Jsut can't use a separate GPU monitor.  Looks like this is more of an NVIDIA interaction with HP BIOS, but I am not a hardware tech to diagnose.

I hope this message is of some use to someone in the future. Thanks to all who have viewed this post.

[OlorinTharkun]

Maybe that might be related to my problem.  My zBook 17 seems to get really hot when the screensaver comes on.  I am always running HW Monitor in the background and maybe the GPU monitoring is causing it to overheat.  It previously had a documented failure of the cooling system and an authorized tech came out and replaced the entire heatsink/fan assembly.  It doesn't make sense that it's overheating during screensaver usage, which is just a photo slideshow essentially.