HD4850 tries to keep low temperature -> high fan speed

[Senshi]

I am a Linux noob.
I am currently trying to set up a home server based on an old computer gifted to me. It's supposed to be used as a sandbox to explore Linux in general and develop/adapt my developments for it. I'm also aiming to use it as some sort of media server, supplying everything and everyone in my apartment with video & music. While I don't expect the server to be extremely power-efficient (due to it using old gaming computer hardware), it should use minimal resources while idle, both to minimize power consumption and noise.

I decided to use Mint simply because I wanted easy-to-use out-of-the-box for my first forays, and I had some minor experiences in the past with it.

My issue is: The mounted Radeon GPU is making plenty of noise. It does vary fan speed on temperature (especially noticeable after start/warm up phase), but it seems it's trying too hard. Using sensors, it seems it's trying to keep temperature at 58.5°C , which requires it to make plenty of noise.

Graphics: Card: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] RV770 [Radeon HD 4850]
Display Server: X.Org 1.18.4 drivers: ati,radeon (unloaded: fbdev,vesa)
Resolution: 1920x1080@60.00hz
GLX Renderer: Gallium 0.4 on AMD RV770 (DRM 2.49.0 / 4.10.0-33-generic, LLVM 4.0.0)
GLX Version: 3.0 Mesa 17.0.7

default engine clock: 635000 kHz
current engine clock: 634370 kHz
default memory clock: 993000 kHz
current memory clock: 990620 kHz
voltage: 1123 mV
PCIE lanes: 16

radeon-pci-0100
Adapter: PCI adapter
temp1: +58.5°C

I don't know how to best monitor what clock and fan speeds it's running at (probably there are some commands I don't know?) to give more info on that.

I tried to look into how to get it to chill a bit, and found plenty of topics describing how to set its "dpm" mode to a lower level (e.g. battery).
However, it seems my card doesn't feature DPM at all. It currently is using the "profile" method, and switching to DPM doesn't work. It doesn't have any of the dpm settings, only power_method and power_profile.

power/
power_method (profile)
power_profile (default)

Any suggestions on how I can get my GPU to relax while idle would be appreciated!

[trytip]

could be hardware issues. have you opened the case up and air-dust all the fans? also in bios there are/should be fan settings

[Senshi]

It's all cleaned, yes.
There are fan settings in BIOS, but not for the GPU (as it's not onboard). Only CPU and SYS, which are not the troublemakers.

[catweazel]

It's all cleaned, yes.
There are fan settings in BIOS, but not for the GPU (as it's not onboard). Only CPU and SYS, which are not the troublemakers.

Are you by any chance using Cinnamon?

[Hoser Rob]

It's all cleaned, yes.
There are fan settings in BIOS, but not for the GPU (as it's not onboard). Only CPU and SYS, which are not the troublemakers.

Are you by any chance using Cinnamon?

My thought too.

The AMD 4850 is a legacy card. Meaning there is no proprietary AMD video driver for that card, and if you install the old one it WILL break your video.

Unless you can get a better (preferably Nvidia) video card for that machine I wouldn't expect it to work very well as a media server.

[Senshi]

@catweazel: I was using Cinnamon, yes. Then I realized that it offers a lot more than I actually care about (plus the temp/noise issues, plus issues when establishing RDP from Win10), so I wiped it all and reinstalled Mint with XFCE. While RDP works great now, the temp/noise issue has been the same.

@Hoser Rob: It's a legacy card, but I'm not asking it to perform ridiculous workloads when idling on a desktop (at least I thought so). Previously, the machine was used as a gaming computer running Win7, and it didn't have the fan/temp issues there (but performance was horrid compared to Mint).
If it's not capable of delivering videos as I hope, I can outsource that workload to a more powerful machine, then it will only serve as a glorified NAS for the "mediaserver" role.

Are proprietary AMD drivers better than the open radeon ones? I read that those perform pretty well by now?


I managed to reduce the temps & fan by setting the power_profile to low using

Code: Select all

echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile

which I could only run after doing sudo -i .
This led to the card clocking down a little bit and reducing voltage, generating less heat and allowing the fan to spin at acceptable, albeit not great volume. It is a shoddy, tiny stock cooler on that GPU, so this is the level I can accept and "live with". Luckily the server will get stuffed away in a behind-wall storage compartment which should help dampen noise (yes, there is sufficient ventilation/cooling in that backspace).

However, that setting gets reverted every time the system restarts. How can I make it stay permanent?

[Hoser Rob]

... Are proprietary AMD drivers better than the open radeon ones? I read that those perform pretty well by now?...

As I said there are no AMD proprietary Linux drivers available for that card. Or any other AMD card older than the 5xxx series, in any Linux distro. Yes, they'd work better than the open source one, and this is really the root of your problem IMO.