bull3964 posted:

If you look around at T480 and T480s overheating, it's actually pretty common. If they are connected to AC power, they seem to idle VERY hot. The thermal management on them seems to be pretty terrible. They'll do this thing where they idle super hot on AC, spin up the fans full tilt which drops it below a threshold, they they basically stop and start the process over again. Over time the whole chassis heat soaks and weird stuff starts happening.

I've had it connected to three different docks including the official one and all exhibit the same issues. Only way to resolve is bounce the machine and it will behave on AC for a little while.

Inside is as spotless as a clean room. It's 100% a firmware bug that people have been complaining about since 2018.

Beyond that, the capabilities of the external monitors is just terrible because they made too many compromises with the way the internal displayport is handled to stick a dumb HDMI port on the thing.

You can choose dual 1080p monitors, anything beyond that is on your head. If you are LUCKY, you can get the thing to settle down for a bit and knock a 4k monitor down to 1080p60 or 4k30 to allow a second monitor to be detected and that config might be stable for awhile. But then the AC bug will hit which drops and reconnects the dock over and over again, confusing the poo poo out of any monitor configuration.

The most stable solution I've found is to drop back to a USB-C dock with Displaylink rather than try to use thunderbolt. It's actually able to use the monitors without issue if the USB-C port is behaving.

My first T480 lasted about 9 months before it developed a memory fault. I know before we closed down the office (pre-covid, we all just went remote 100% of the time) there wouldn't be a week that went by without someone sending back one that failed.