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I have similar problem with T420s from 2012 - great laptop, but there's a lot of coil whine and horrible fan with very small heatsink. It's a model without dedicated GPU, but i5 alone is enough to push the fan to constant medium-high speed and it's still 70-80°C running Windows 10 with Chrome. Repasting or cleaning the heatsink does not seem to help.

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I have a T420s but with an optimus configuration. The dedicated GPU is pretty much useless because of thermal throttling and yes, even the i5 alone is often enough to go into throttling territory. This is after repasting and thorough cleaning of the fan assembly. And if you want to access the fan assembly then prepare taking apart the whole laptop.

Huh, interesting. I have two T420s laptops (i7s with dedicated GPUs), and have a friend with one too (i5 integrated). None of them has those issues, but we all run Ubuntu. One of mine did have fan issues once, but it was due to the fan itself going bad, and once replaced it was fine.

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