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I'm running a 64-bit Mint 15 on a Lenovo x121e with AMD E-450 and Radeon HD graphics.

I'm worried about the high temperatures (I had Ubuntu before and never even noticed anything, so I never checked to have a comparison).

My idle temp is about 60, simple browsing 65-70. Watching a youtube video gets me up to 75. I haven't installed LaTeX yet, but I'm worried compiling there - which I do a lot - will be even worse...

Additionally I don't really see the fan rpm responding to the temp changes in a way I would deem appropriate. I'm attaching a printscreen of psensors for the temperature and fan rpm. You can see the temp go up from about 65 to 75 over a couple of minutes - this is me watching a youtube video - but the fan rpm stays at 500 +/- 2. What gives? (The max rpm of 570 you an see is from startup, then it falls to around 500 and stays there no matter what).

enter image description here This is all with the laptop flat on a table surface, ambient temperature at 25. I like it being quiet, but I'd rather it make some noise than constantly work at such high temps..

Any ideas?

Also, yesterday I left it idle for a few hours - all it was doing was syncing dropbox - and after I came back the max temp showed 80!?

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  • Just wondering, will your BIOS show temp and fan info? If so then if you just let it idle in the BIOS what does it show for fan speed and temp?
    – SailorCire
    Aug 14, 2014 at 3:25
  • Thanks SailorCire! Unfortunately the laptop is currently in a different country than me, but I'll check that as soon as I get to it and report back! Aug 14, 2014 at 12:31
  • Which drivers are you using? Power saving with some Radeon chips might require manually turning on.
    – XTL
    May 28, 2015 at 16:32

1 Answer 1

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I had this same problem on a Toshiba Satellite with Ubuntu 14.04 (Ubuntu/Windows dual boot). When running Windows, the laptop's temperature would remain stable, but on Ubuntu it kept on overheating.

I managed to fix it by installing two utilities, thermald and indicator-cpufreq:

sudo apt-get install indicator-cpufreq

and/or

sudo apt-get install thermald

indicator-cpufreq will allow you a lot more direct control over your CPU's frequency (which might be a possible cause of the problem) whereas thermald was specifically created to monitor temperature and automatically take steps to lower it. Normally you wouldn't need to configure anything with thermald, so it might be worth it to try it first. Just install it and leave it to do its thing.

From what I understand, thermald is available for Mint as well, as Mint is an Ubuntu-based distro.

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