Fedora causes laptop to overheat

[Patrick Lists]

On 12/11/2011 08:38 PM, Christopher Svanefalk wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 8:35 PM, Christopher Svanefalk
> <christopher.svanefalk at gmail.com
> <mailto:christopher.svanefalk at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Dear all,
>
>     I have been running Fedora since Werewolf. Recently, I had to start
>     dualbooting Windows XP because of collegework, and one of the things
>     I noticed rather fast was how much cooler my system runs under XP.
>     Now I want to know why.
>
>     On F16, my system will sometimes have the fans running at
>     medium-high speed even while idling and just Epiphany running (for
>     Gmail and FB chat...this does not to my knowledge generate anything
>     else but sporadic cpu bursts and occasional I/O). The HDD becomes
>     unreasonably hot (despite iotop not reporting significant disc
>     activity apart from syslog and some Gnome-specific daemons), and the
>     CPU (Core2Duo) and VGA (Intel HD4500) also seem to be running
>     needlessly hot.
>
>     Does anyone know of a good way to debug exactly what is causing my
>     system to idle in this way? Obviously something somewhere is causing
>     my hardware to idle in a  very wrong way, and it would be helpful to
>     nail down just what the cause is.
>
>     Thanks in advance!
>
>     Chris
>
>
> Addendum: more than a few times the laptop has actually shut down due to
> overheating, even while not running on overddrive (just Epiphany with
> YouTube, Gmail, FB, Eclipse and some non-intensive stuff running). This
> sort of clues at least me to believe it might be VGA-related (it the
> fans normally go into overdrive when Youtube is up).
>
> I am running an HP Probook 4510s if anyone else has had similar issues.

FWIW I have seen something similar on my workstation with up-to-date F16 
x86_64 with GNOME3. The ATI HD57xx card heats up to more than 90C even 
when I was just typing an email in Thunderbird and nothing else loaded. 
I also had several total lock-ups. I could not ping the box and reaching 
it with ssh failed. I have not been able to find the cause. After I 
installed the proprietary Catalyst drivers I have not seen any lockups 
anymore. And the fans in the workstation are much quieter so temperature 
seems to have dropped also.

Regards,
Patrick