My laptop gets very (87°C) hot when I do not deliberately make the CPU go slower
Today, when I started it, I was going to go do the usual routine of running sudo cpupower --cpu all frequency-set --max 1.7GHz, only to find the following error:
Setting cpu: 0
Error setting new values. Common errors:
- Do you have proper administration rights? (super-user?)
- Is the governor you requested available and modprobed?
- Trying to set an invalid policy?
- Trying to set a specific frequency, but userspace governor is not available,
for example because of hardware which cannot be set to a specific frequency
or because the userspace governor isn't loaded?
I tried researching the last of those, got a command that seems relevant, but it doesn’t work:
sudo modprobe acpi_cpufreq
modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'acpi_cpufreq': No such device
Noticeably, /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0 contains no cpufreq folder, probably as a result of one of these
I want to know what steps I’d have to take to get cpupower to work once more
At the risk of stating the obvious, why does it get quite so hot - it should be in the order of 40 - 50C when idling, ramping up to 70+ and such under high load. It very much should NOT be running at nearly 90C unless you’re thrashing the daylights out of it.
You also should not have to artificially throttle it every time you boot.
Tried cleaning out the fans and heatpipe fins? Accumulated dust would cause this kind of thing and it would be trivial to correct it, give you more laptop to play with and not force you to do this artificial throttling dance every boot…
You can quickly check if something is running which is burning cpu cycles via htop or btop.
That’s bizarre. I’d expect them to be whistling like a kettle desperately trying to cool down CPU’s at 87C… are you positive they really DO run that hot and whatever you’re using to read the temp from them isn’t giving you erroneous values?
I suppose the pertinent question now is, give that @akirapink has some scorching hot cores, and has a desire to limit the clockspeed, and is no longer able top do so using cpupower for reasons yet to be established, how does one do it that using tuned?
Looks like it can be done by building a profile for tuned which sets the scaling_max_freq to a suitable value.
I assume there’s some tool which can be used to assist in this, but I have zero experience with configuring tuned so I’ll sit back and learn alongside you.
Unless Akira has opened the laptop, taken off the heatsink, scraped off the thermal paste, reattached the heatsink, there is a very high chance that this is a misunderstanding about how thermal paste is used, and it is used, and everything is okay there.