[ltp] Z61p GPU Thermal Issue

[JP Renaud]

> Date: Friday 31 Aug 2007 
> From: "Brian D. Ropers-Huilman" <brian@ropers-huilman.net>
> I have been fighting a graphics problem on my Z61p since I received it
> at work, back in January. Very shortly after starting X with every
> version of the fglrx driver I've tried (Kubuntu provided or built from
> source), my system will randomly, yet gracefully, shutdown. I tracked
> these down to a critical thermal event, with ACPI reporting a
> temperature of 128C! I then started watching temperatures via ACPI
> (watch acpi -t), but ACPI was only looking at CPU temperatures. With
> the thinkpad_acpi module loaded, I, of course, have access to the
> /proc/acpi/ibm/thermal file, which I finally took a look at, and it
> includes the GPU temperature. This is where my problem lies.
>
> Using vesa, I hover around 115C and 120C, which is awful hot to start
> with in my opinion. I can "stress" the GPU just by grabbing a window
> and "wiggling" it around, causing the temperature to rise 2-3 C. If I
> watch a video at full screen, even with the vesa driver, I eventually
> hit the critical 128 C (usually within 30-40 minutes) and the system
> will gracefully shut itself down. I reach this point with the fglrx
> driver just by starting a desktop environment, let alone really doing
> anything graphics intensive.
>
> Does anybody have any ideas on why the GPU runs so hot or on how to
> mitigate this problem? I would love to run fglrx, allowing me to
> finally run this machine in it's native wide-screen mode and,
> admittedly, to do some beryl eye-candy goodness.
>
> The Z61p has an ATI MOBILITY FireGL V5200 (M56GL, ID 0x71C4). I've run
> vesa since I had the box (even though it still gives me problems),
> I've tried many versions of fglrx (provided by Kubuntu and compiled
> from source), as well as the new avivo driver (from a git tree after
> I'd bumped my box to a Kubuntu v7.10 tribe 3 release, which included
> the needed X server v1.3) and nothing really works.
>
> I am very open to suggestions. I'm starting to go down the path of the
> performance management tools in the newer fglrx drivers (throttling
> the clock speed down to keep the GPU at a lower temperature). Does
> anyone have any experience with this?
>
> Just as an FYI, here's a capture of what I see:
>
> bropers@isohel:~/fglrx/8.33.6$ uptime
>  14:23:21 up 34 min,  7 users,  load average: 0.23, 0.15, 0.09
> bropers@isohel:~/fglrx/8.33.6$ acpi -V
>     Battery 1: charging, 98%, 00:17:25 until charged
>     Thermal 1: ok, 49.0 degrees C
>     Thermal 2: ok, 47.0 degrees C
>  AC Adapter 1: on-line
> bropers@isohel:~/fglrx/8.33.6$
> Message from syslogd@isohel at Wed Feb 14 14:23:26 2007 ...
> isohel kernel: [17181628.648000] Critical temperature reached (128 C),
> shutting down.
>
> NOTE: that's a whopping 5 seconds between seeing normal CPU
> temperatures and a very light CPU load to reaching 128 C on the GPU
> and ACPI shutting the system down.
>
> Thanks, very, very, very much, in advance, if someone has any ideas.

You did not say whether this laptop ever worked properly. Was it working fine 
before the Kubuntu install? Also, have you checked the machine in Windows? 
Just to make sure it is not a hardware problem with your video card...

JP


> --
> Brian D. Ropers-Huilman



-- 
JP Renaud

http://www.jprenaud.info