Arch Linux

davidjosepha

Member

Registered: 2013-02-21

Posts: 54

Graphics card fan "gearing up" and slowing down repeatedly with dpm

I enabled dpm the other day for the additionally performance, and it has helped considerably with the few games I've been playing. However, when using my computer normally (running dwm with mpd/ncmpcpp, dwb, conky, and a few other processes, but not much), I'll hear the graphics card fan speeding up into high performance mode, then promptly slow down to regular mode. It'll do this once every few seconds. Beside it being mildly annoying, I'm worried this constant change is going to wear out my graphics card fan prematurely. So, two questions:

1. Is the constant switching from idle to active fan levels something that could hurt my card?

2. Is there a setting I can switch with dpm to raise the cutoff between battery/performance and low/high so that it won't go into performance mode till a higher level than it's currently going to it at?

marcelhb

Member

Registered: 2014-07-25

Posts: 2

Re: Graphics card fan "gearing up" and slowing down repeatedly with dpm

bumping this thead since I'm having the same problem with the addition that the system lags when the fan is accelerating... so it's really annoying..
I'm using nvidia-prime with the 331 driver for my GT650M (Optimus technology) card...

Please let me know if I can provide any helpful information...

Thanks in advance for any help!!

marcelhb

Member

Registered: 2014-07-25

Posts: 2

Re: Graphics card fan "gearing up" and slowing down repeatedly with dpm

It seems that the problem (at least for me) is related with i8kutils..

davijosepha, could you please try this?

sudo service i8kmon stop
i8kfan 2 2

And see if the problem is fixed? It worked for me and I've filled up a bug report here.

Hope it helps!

slowz

Member

Registered: 2013-08-17

Posts: 6

Re: Graphics card fan "gearing up" and slowing down repeatedly with dpm

I suppose ATI card is in question... there is a section on ArchWiki concerning DPM. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/At … management
I ran those two commands as root, not with sudo cause it will not work.But I did it with full root rights. So do:
# su
# echo battery > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_state
# echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level

ofc this might not be ok for your case cause of lower performance but for me is exceptable since I don't do games. As for desktop/browsing/youtube everything works smoothly.

good luck.