CPU Runs 20+ Degrees Hotter with Mint 7

[Morgen]

I recently set up a dual boot system Mint 7 and Windows Vista. When I boot up Mint 7 it shows CPU usage less than 25% but the CPU temp will get into 60-70C range. This same system running Vista runs at a nice cool 40-45C. I have a Intel Core 2 at 2.6 GHz stock settings with dual GTX8800 with the whole system water cooled (Radiator->CPU->Video1->Video2). The heat is definitely coming from the CPU as both video cards report lower temperatures which should not be the case based on my setup and under Vista the video card temps are higher as would be expected.

I love Mint and would like to shift from windows but with this temperature issue this is simply not an option. Any ideas on what could be causing this problem?

Thanks,

Morgen

[igorzwx]

I would presume that this might be the effect of PulseAudio

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=32637
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=32725

Bug #362203 in pulseaudio (Ubuntu): “Skype high CPU use on 9.04 ...
Yes, using pulseaudio with skype in 9.04 gives a leak of memory, but fortunately it is possible to avoid using pulseaudio with skype. ...
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/362203

Bug #362203:
Skype high CPU use on 9.04 using pulse (and audio recording/sending delay >5sec)

As I remember, PulseAudio can also produce CPU and RAM troubles with Adobe Flash

You may Google this: "Ubuntu bug ..."

[proxima_centauri]

Igorzwk, please try to gather more facts before you make presumptions... although I'm not saying your wrong - I've seen countless threads this week where you suggest to remove PulseAudio, I don't see any justification for that based on the posters details. It would be a mistake to advise to remove something that works perfectly fine to begin with!

Morgen,
Just as a note, different temperature software can produce different results.
Are these temperatures from an idle system? Using programs? If so, which programs? Any noticeable resource hogs?
Are you running any power saving features in Vista? In Linux Mint you can also scale your processor if it supports it, this may help, (you can try adding the cpu frequency applet to the panel if you wish to try).

[igorzwx]

Hi proxima_centauri !

In this particular case, it was just a hypothesis, an assumption:
"I would presume that this might be the effect of PulseAudio".

My advice was to Google the problem.

Although, of course, you are right. I tend to advise the users to remove the master bug.

[DrHu]

I recently set up a dual boot system Mint 7 and Windows Vista. When I boot up Mint 7 it shows CPU usage less than 25% but the CPU temp will get into 60-70C range. This same system running Vista runs at a nice cool 40-45C. I have a Intel Core 2 at 2.6 GHz stock settings

Might help to know the Intel CPU model numbers T*

Although you don't specify this: if the Vista OS CPU use is a higher percentage, I don't know how based on physical law, that the CPU temp would be lower than an OS that runs the CPU at a lower percentage
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178072.aspx
http://windowsitpro.com/article/article ... lorer.html

And is that extra 20degree setting outside the safe temperature range of that CPU rating ?

Some Linux controls..
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/cpu-usage- ... for-linux/

[Morgen]

Thanks for the posts

igorzwx: Pulse Audio is asleep, I don't think this is it.

Proxima: These temps are at idle. I have installed the cpu frequency monitor and most of the time it reads 59%. I have been watching the process monitor but most processes are 7% or less. I am beginning to suspect the monitoring software. I am using sensors-applet 2.2.1.

DrHu: The CPU usage for Vista and Mint are comparable, only the temperature is reported as higher in Mint. This also leads me to think that maybe I have an error in my monitoring software. As for the CPU its an Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 Conroe 2.66GHz

Any thoughts on the monitoring software or setup?

Thanks for any help.

Morgen

[igorzwx]

QUOTE: "I have installed the cpu frequency monitor and most of the time it reads 59%."

I observed this with Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 2 (and 3, if I am not mistaken).
And what do think I did?
To be fair, I do not remember exactly, because I tend to make experiments on a regular basis.

EDIT: If I am not mistaken, CPU and RAM were consumed mainly by X

Type on Terminal:

top

[Morgen]

igorzwx,

I appreciate your trying to help. Top simply provides the same information as the System Monitor, which tells me I have low to negligible CPU usage but this does not explain the high CPU temps reported.

Thanks,

Morgen

[igorzwx]

Hi!

Just paste your message to Google:
http://www.google.com/search?q=ubuntu%2 ... 8&oe=UTF-8

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[tinca]

morgen

I am sorry but I cannot help with your problem, as I find it a bit strange.

As you can see from my sig I have a different rig to you, but the main difference is that you have water cooling and I am running on air.

I am "Protein Folding" 24/7 and all four cores are running permanently at 100% CPU usage. My temperatures using "sensors" are all under 44 degrees.

I would suspect that your software is giving you false readings, as with a water cooled set up it should not be that high, and as you have said that Windows runs 20 degrees lower the likely culprit would be software.

Best regards Keith

[uilenspiegel]

I hate to post an inexact reply to a thread, but I have some experience of the temperature issue and figure my two cents may be a bit helpful.

First, what Morgen reports is real. I've seen the same thing, and the Ubuntu forums have lots of similar reports.

Second, to the best of my belief it's hardware-dependent. I'm running Mint Gloria on 3 different laptops:

- a Dell Mini 9 (actually the Vostro A90, a Mini 9 clone for Dell's business line) that was configured at the factory to run with Ubuntu 8.04. It runs nice and cool and has an apparently inexhaustible battery. Mint on this thing is like paradise.

- a Dell Latitude C640, probably 5 years old at this point. Runs pretty hot with Windows XP, runs pretty hot with Mint, no noticeable difference. I've left it running for days without worrying that I'm going to fry the hardware.

- a Lenovo X61. With Windows XP it ran at a perfectly cool temperature --- never noticed it or even thought about it. With Mint 7, it's like the anvil of the sun. Hot enough that you don't want it on your lap, and you definitely don't want to leave it on when you're not using it. With just Firefox/Opera and Open Office running, it would regularly get up to close to 60 degrees C. I played a couple of MAME roms once for about 20 minutes only to find that sensor 0 was reading over 80 degrees C (have not done that again). To be clear, the CPU is not pegged --- it spends nearly all its time at 33% usage, the lowest state, and is still much hotter than it was running XP.

So I spent a long time trawling the Ubuntu, Lenovo, and Thinkwiki forums looking for answers for this last laptop. I found a number of testimonies of the "this worked for me ..." variety but nothing that seemed to work for people across the board (or that worked for me). I also found a number of what looked to me like knowledgable posts claiming that heat and battery life issues with linux are likely going to be a problem as long as hardware manufacturers don't open up their specs to the linux community; this squared with my experience of the laptop w/factory-installed-linux running Mint flawlessly, while my X61 is burning down the house. (Again, sorry for being vague --- normally I would like to be more precise, supply links, etc., but this was a couple of months ago, and I didn't keep records of these particular findings; anyway if you spend some time in the Ubuntu forum you will surely be able to find similar accounts for yourself.)

In the end I tried about a million things to reduce temperature and power usage; some things helped and some didn't:

Didn't help:
- powertop. I was most disappointed in this, as it had seemed the most promising of all the possible solutions. Probably I did not pursue the use of the utility far enough, but just the fact that its initial recommendations made no difference at all and that I couldn't find any posts out there that unambiguously said "powertop's going to tell you to do x, y, and z and that's going to cut the temperature noticeably" leads me to believe that it's not going to provide a generally applicable fix.

Not sure:
- disabled Bluetooth (added "echo disable > /proc/acpi/ibm/bluetooth" to /etc/init.d/rc.local). Honestly I can't remember if this made a difference or not, I don't recall any particular improvement.

Helped, apparently:
- Thinkpad fan control: once I installed and configured this to have the fan running at 100% pretty much all the time, I was able to keep the laptop a few degrees cooler (though with no battery life to speak of). There are other fan control apps out there for other systems, like gkrellm, that will work better or worse for different systems.
- I hesitate to report this, since I haven't gone back to test it repeatedly, but at one point I upped my RAM from 2G to 4G and the consistent temp for normal usage dropped instantly from just under 60 degrees C to just under 50 degrees C. A huge change, in other words. I should really go pop that second stick in and out a few times just to confirm that this works repeatably, but it did appear to happen exactly like that. Thanks to this improvement, at any rate, the laptop temp is high but tolerable, and so I've been able to stick with Mint for most of my work.

That's about all I can say about it. If others have corroborating / contradicting detail, or know about possible improvements in Mint Helena, it would be great to hear about that.

[uilenspiegel]

So I've just installed Helena RC1 and am very pleased to report that my laptop is no longer running hot (which is to say, it is running at temperatures comparable to those under Windows XP). Morgen, you should give Helena a try if you haven't already.