Hello all,
my beloved Thinkpad W510 kinda exploded recently and I need some advice from people who are versed in PC repair / finding errors.
Sadly replacement fans are quite expensive, so I want to make sure it's just the fan before I waste my money and destroy my W510 even more.
Also if the reason for the fan dying to soon is another one, then a new fan will also work some time and then die again.
For maybe two weeks my fan couldn't keep up his RPM when being on max RPM.
The speed basically oscillated between full speed and a little bit less in roundabout the rhythm of a police siren.
Like PFFFF-fffff-FFFFF-fffff-FFFFF-fffff.
Then two decoupling SMD capacitors of a VRM IC exploded and it went out.
I took it apart and replaced the capacitors.
The state it's in now is the following:
When the BIOS is checking the Fan one of those things happens:
- no fan spin and a fan error
- a short spin up and also fan error
- a longer spin up and it boots.
When it boots the fan is either:
-doing the same as described in the beginning
-or not turning on at all until the CPU melts
So my question to people who are versed in repair is:
Does that sound like a damaged fan to you or more like a damaged fan controller/driver.
And has anybody tipps on how to check for that? Measuring output voltages or something?
Or any transistors in the path that are likely to fail?
I have the full schematic by the way, which is how I was able to replace the capacitors.
Also how likely is it, that the capacitors died just because of overheating due to the subpar fan performance?
I changed the fan maybe a year ago and clean it regularly so it wasn't clogged.
Have a nice day!
my beloved Thinkpad W510 kinda exploded recently and I need some advice from people who are versed in PC repair / finding errors.
Sadly replacement fans are quite expensive, so I want to make sure it's just the fan before I waste my money and destroy my W510 even more.
Also if the reason for the fan dying to soon is another one, then a new fan will also work some time and then die again.
For maybe two weeks my fan couldn't keep up his RPM when being on max RPM.
The speed basically oscillated between full speed and a little bit less in roundabout the rhythm of a police siren.
Like PFFFF-fffff-FFFFF-fffff-FFFFF-fffff.
Then two decoupling SMD capacitors of a VRM IC exploded and it went out.
I took it apart and replaced the capacitors.
The state it's in now is the following:
When the BIOS is checking the Fan one of those things happens:
- no fan spin and a fan error
- a short spin up and also fan error
- a longer spin up and it boots.
When it boots the fan is either:
-doing the same as described in the beginning
-or not turning on at all until the CPU melts
So my question to people who are versed in repair is:
Does that sound like a damaged fan to you or more like a damaged fan controller/driver.
And has anybody tipps on how to check for that? Measuring output voltages or something?
Or any transistors in the path that are likely to fail?
I have the full schematic by the way, which is how I was able to replace the capacitors.
Also how likely is it, that the capacitors died just because of overheating due to the subpar fan performance?
I changed the fan maybe a year ago and clean it regularly so it wasn't clogged.
Have a nice day!





