nVidia card overheating.

alexcortes · Posted: Fri Mar 25, 2016 4:26 pm Post subject: nVidia card overheating.

Hello fellows!

My laptop always had heat issues but from a few months for now the nvidia card (9400m G) is becaming near unusable, with ~84ºC idle (either with X/KDE running or not) when before it was ~72ºC.

My first try was about thermal grease, doesn't help.

Yesterday I made a test running the KaOS live image to find out if the temperature would be the same as my Gentoo installation, and with KaOS the idle temp was about 72ºC.

I do not have idea of what may be raising the GPU temp on my Gentoo installation!

dmesg: http://pastebin.com/8Qx1J1B7

emerge --info: http://pastebin.com/wCaCbPqQ

kernel config: http://pastebin.com/V9ht3BGV

Thanks!!!

ct85711 · Veteran Joined: 27 Sep 2005 Posts: 1791

I remember seeing reports of this issue caused by the nvidia drivers before (don't remember when), but just wondering, have you tried downgrading the drivers and see if that helps?

alexcortes · Posted: Fri Mar 25, 2016 5:31 pm Post subject:

Oh thanks!

I began to emerge old version really now.

Thanks!

EDIT: to make the things ever worse, the heatsink is shared between the CPU and the GPU. Any rise on CPU temp also rise the GPU too.

alexcortes · Posted: Fri Mar 25, 2016 7:58 pm Post subject:

Downgrading didn't help. I haven't tried the 340.93-r1 because I would need to downgrade X and kernel too.

I have another laptop sitting here (AMD A6) I think I will install Gentoo there and put this one to retirement.

For now I will underclock the nvidia card.

Thanks!

paulj · Guru Joined: 30 Sep 2004 Posts: 513 Location: Wales, UK

A couple of thoughts:

Is the air passage to and from the heatsink clear?
Is the CPU busy all the time? I suggest you emerge and run htop (sys-process/htop) from a terminal (with and without X, and see what is running and how much CPU capacity is being used).
Does KaOS use the same settings for hardware acceleration?
You could give nouveau a try: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Nouveau_%26_nvidia-drivers_switching

alexcortes · Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2016 4:09 pm Post subject:

@paulj

Everything is ok about air cooling, new thermal grease too and I am with air conditioning on near 24/7 too.

The CPU is idle I already had a look.

Trying more with KaOS anything I did make the temperature os the GPU up to high levels very fast - CPU is very ok, just the idle was better os KaOS.

With nouveau the things was even worse, I couldn't finish the boot due to overheating, thats why I got the KaOS to have how to install the nvidia driver back.

Anyway, I am already installing on the other laptop.

Thanks!