[~Solved] Dell Studio 1555 - temperatures not dropping enough

Question

Hello all,
On a fresh Arch installation (base/base-devel + some basic stuff - xorg, mesa, ati open source driver, no DE), the fan remains constantly on and audible.
I let the system stay idle overnight (about 6.5 hours) in order to stabilize temperatures, and checked the sensors as soon as I opened the lid (screen turned itself off).
It's worth noting that fan was active in the morning, and I have no reason to believe it was not active all night.
CPU - the CPU is Intel P8600. Using cpufrequtils, I made sure the current governor is "ondemand" and indeed the CPU ran at it lowest frequency (800Mhz) prior to leaving the system.
GPU - the GPU is ATI mobility Radeon 4570. I used the Profile-based frequency switching, and echoed "low" as current profile (for the sake of testing), and indeed the GPU clocks ran at their lowest prior to leaving the system.
Once I opened the lid, the sensors read as follows:
acpitz-virtual-0
temp1: 52
temp2: 52
temp3: 59
radeon-pci-0100
temp1: 60.5
coretemp-isa-0000
core0: 47
core1: 47
I suppose the first one is the motherboard the the following are GPU, CPU in that order.
Now, for the sake of comparison, after taking the sensors measurement, I logged in to Windows 7, and waited a few minutes.
Temperatures dropped in about 5-7 degrees (and I've seen it lower in the past), which was enough for the fan to become less active.
This leads me to believe that the problem isn't in the fan itself, but rather with the temperatures that do not drop enough for the fan to calm itself down.
Any ideas what else I should do in order to lower the temperatures?
Thanks, Adam.
* EDIT *
Do tools like Laptop Mode Tools have an effect on temperature, or mainly on battery life?
Last edited by adam777 (2012-05-31 17:41:03)

Answer 1

OK, second overnight is done - a little better now that the dust is gone.
This time I used dynpm for the GPU powersaving and not low, which might have caused the temperatures not to drop all the way down.
I got a drop of ~5-7 degrees across the board, which makes the temperatures comparable to the Windows system (though, in turn, the Windows system also manage to drop the temperatures a bit more).
Fan is still a bit too audible for my taste (not too bad, though), but I guess the only thing left at this point as far as CPU and GPU are concerned is switching to the ATI proprietary driver.
I'm not sure about the proprietary driver, as it seems it cause some problems here and there.
Adam.
* EDIT *
it's worth noting the above is done without a DE, I guess I can expect results to be worse once a DE is involved.
Last edited by adam777 (2012-05-29 07:45:25)