2009/5/20 David C. Rankin
Rafał Miłecki wrote:
2009/5/20 David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
: One last issue,
For some reason, my laptop runs hotter with the radeonhd driver. Does this make sense?? Is is possible?? Are there any tweaks that can be made to cool it down besides throwing water on it?
That's because radeonhd doesn't downclock engine or memory by default. Actually we support only engine down clocking for now and it's available only with git version of driver (1.2.5 is too old).
You can use Option "ForceLowPowerMode" then.
You can also experiment with Option "LowPowerModeEngineClock" "int" just get: grep "Default Engine" /var/log/Xorg.0.log and divide clock by more than 2 (for example clock/4 or even /8).
Rafał,
Thank you. I got a default engine clock of 400,000 MHz and then set the following Options in the Device section of xorg.conf:
Option "ForceLowPowerMode" Option "LowPowerModeEngineClock" "50000"
then restarted X and it didn't make any difference. I even rebooted to make sure. Can you suggest anything else I can try to decrease the clocking to control the heat produced?
Then I swapped hard drives in the laptop and booted openSuSE 11.0 running the ATI 8-9 release fglrx driver (ver. 8.532) to check. Heat/Fan Speed dropped significantly and the palm rest temperature returned to normal.
That test showed just how important downclocking is for the radeonhd driver. Without it, my left palm was cooked to "medium-well" just be resting my hands normally on the laptop palm rests. With the fglrx driver, which I presume does some type of downclocking, the heat load from the laptop is greatly reduced.
If you would like me to send configs, logs, or dumps from either the Archlinux install or the openSuSE install, just let me know. Thanks.
As Matthias mentioned, we downclock engine only. Ideally we should downclock memory and power off some chipsets. Anyway, you should see some difference. Can you attach your /var/log/Xorg.0.log so we can be sure you used right version of radeonhd and right options? -- Rafał Miłecki -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: radeonhd+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: radeonhd+help@opensuse.org