My laptop fan running all the time.

bahyx · 2011-06-26 04:44:27

Hi
I know this question has been asked alot but none of the other topics that i found were helpful.
like the title said my laptop fan runs quite loud all the time even when i am not doing anything .
when i type "top" in terminal there is no prosses that puts unusual load on my cpus and i have
installed lm-sensors and my cpu useually runs below 40c when i am not doing anything however
i found out that my gpu temp is always above 50c so something must be hitting it all the time
which i have no idea what it might be ,the only suspicion that i have is gnome shell .
and since my laptops gpu and cpu are sharing a same fan and heatsink i am convinced the problem is my gpu.
my gpu is an ati radeon hd 5470 and i am running the open source ati driver.
here is the sensor output when i dont have any application open.
acpitz-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1: +39.0°C (crit = +103.0°C)
temp2: +40.0°C (crit = +103.0°C)

radeon-pci-0100
Adapter: PCI adapter
temp1: +50°C

so my questions are :
is it normal? could i solve the problem by installing ati proprietary driver? is there is anyway i could find out what it is that hitting my gpu ? and any suggestion that might put me
in the right direction would be much appreciated.

sn1987a · 2011-06-26 05:18:36

have you put "acpi=on" in the grub boot menu ?

bahyx · 2011-06-26 06:25:13

sn1987a wrote:

have you put "acpi=on" in the grub boot menu ?

Yes but it hasnt helped

einhard · 2011-06-26 08:47:19

These are normal temperatures for your CPU and GPU (I will even say they are surprisingly low). In most cases graphics card have much more higher temperature than processor because it's further from heat sink and heat pipe(s) are less effective this way. On my old laptop I have T9400 with GF 9600M GT and temperatures on idle were always 40-42 for CPU and 58-62 for GPU. It's normal for many notebooks.

If your fan noise bugs you, you can use fancontrol https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fan_Speed_Control. In your case the safe temperatures for CPU on idle are 40-50, for GPU 50-70.

You can also check situation with catalyst driver from AMD. It seems your ati driver triggers fan events which shouldn't happen on default.

Last edited by einhard (2011-06-26 08:55:37)

Pyntux · 2011-06-26 09:35:32

I do not have ati gpu, but on friends laptop with catalyst driver from AMD temp are 10c lower on Arch, Open Suse and Kubuntu...

bahyx · 2011-06-26 20:40:31

Yep, my gpu runs cooler with catalyst and its quite. but after installing catalyst the gnome shell 3 panel was all messed up, it had a funny colour and strange looking
icons , seems like its a common problem and there is no fix for it. so i went back to the opensource driver for now.

AnnS · 2011-06-27 04:49:16

I have a laptop with a 6550m card and had the same problem with the open source driver. I had to remove it because I noticed that my laptop was too hot (and also, at boot just before the DE loaded, there was a distorted image, with lines and dots, although just for a few seconds). And just so you know, in my case it wasn't just with GNOME, with XFCE was just the same.

With the propietary driver everything is normal. And I had the exact same problem with GNOME shell, as well. But I'm in XFCE now and everything works fine.

I hope they fix that in GNOME, though I do like XFCE but I was starting to like this new version of GNOME. I wonder if in KDE it's the same.

Sorry for my english.

Last edited by AnnS (2011-06-27 04:51:44)

Arch Linux

#1 2011-06-26 04:44:27

My laptop fan running all the time.

#2 2011-06-26 05:18:36

Re: My laptop fan running all the time.

#3 2011-06-26 06:25:13

Re: My laptop fan running all the time.

#4 2011-06-26 08:47:19

Re: My laptop fan running all the time.

#5 2011-06-26 09:35:32

Re: My laptop fan running all the time.

#6 2011-06-26 20:40:31

Re: My laptop fan running all the time.

#7 2011-06-27 04:49:16

Re: My laptop fan running all the time.

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