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dbacc

Member

Registered: 2014-09-25

Posts: 120

Idle Temperature Nvidia Card Very High

Hi,

I'm running a Lenovo T420 with Nvidia NVS 4200M and proprietary drivers (optimus via bumblebee).

I'm watching GPU temperature, and even in idle mode and fan running at full speed, temperature will not drop below 50°. That is definitely too much and as the same strategy under windows will cool down gpu's temperature below 40° this has to be some software/driver issue.

However, for me it seems like there are no powersaving options I could change; as far as I could figure out, there is also no direct way to get access to the current voltage.

On the other side

daniel-think% nvidia-smi -q -d MEMORY     

==============NVSMI LOG==============

Timestamp                           : Mon Jan  5 00:22:28 2015
Driver Version                      : 343.36

Attached GPUs                       : 1
GPU 0000:01:00.0
    FB Memory Usage
        Total                       : 1023 MiB
        Used                        : 3 MiB
        Free                        : 1020 MiB
    BAR1 Memory Usage
        Total                       : N/A
        Used                        : N/A
        Free                        : N/A

shows, that gpu is not really active.

Do you have any hints for me?

Buddlespit

Member

From: Chesapeake, Va.

Registered: 2014-02-07

Posts: 507

Re: Idle Temperature Nvidia Card Very High

Hot for those gpu's is about 80C-85C.

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An old man, trying to stay sane

dbacc

Member

Registered: 2014-09-25

Posts: 120

Re: Idle Temperature Nvidia Card Very High

Idle? With full fan speed?

dice

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2014-02-10

Posts: 413

Re: Idle Temperature Nvidia Card Very High

Maybe your card is not powered off by bbswitch/bumblebee.
Keep in mind that using nvidia-smi enables the nvidia card and prevents bbswitch from disabling it again! This raises the temperature on my machine too when I wait a moment.

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I put at button on it. Yes. I wish to press it, but I'm not sure what will happen if I do.  (Gune | Titan A.E.)

dbacc

Member

Registered: 2014-09-25

Posts: 120

Re: Idle Temperature Nvidia Card Very High

yes, thats the problem!

What I don't understand. When exactly is something preventing bumblee from shutting down the card? And why is nvidia-smi doing so?

dice

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2014-02-10

Posts: 413

Re: Idle Temperature Nvidia Card Very High

nvidia-smi loads the nvidia module. bbswitch cannot power off the card while it is in use by nvidia.
You can do

modprobe -r nvidia
echo OFF >> /proc/acpi/bbswitch

this should disable the card again.

Another option is to restart bumblebeed.service

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I put at button on it. Yes. I wish to press it, but I'm not sure what will happen if I do.  (Gune | Titan A.E.)

dbacc

Member

Registered: 2014-09-25

Posts: 120

Re: Idle Temperature Nvidia Card Very High

okay, seems like I have some misunderstanding concerning power-management in bumblebee:

Since Bumblebee 3.0, this feature is enabled by default, using bbswitch. This allows for automatic PM, without any additional configuration. It's not the perfect solution and may not work on some laptops.

https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bu … Management

So this just means, I can use the code-snippet above for the use with some pm-utils? But what means "without any additional configuration" then?

dice

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2014-02-10

Posts: 413

Re: Idle Temperature Nvidia Card Very High

running nvidia-smi actually circumvents bumblee and bbswitch.
bumblebee can only take care of programs run through optirun or primusrun.
Wait...this means you can just run 

optirun nvidia-smi

and bumblebee loads the nvidia module executes nvidia-smi and then unloads the nvidia module and switches the card off again.

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I put at button on it. Yes. I wish to press it, but I'm not sure what will happen if I do.  (Gune | Titan A.E.)

dbacc

Member

Registered: 2014-09-25

Posts: 120

Re: Idle Temperature Nvidia Card Very High

Good point. That's it. Unfortunately I have some more configuration problems with proprietary nvidia driver, thus I switched to nouveau. Nevertheless, I run into displaying problems with my third screen

Thanks anyway:)