How to prevent overheating under linux with an intel card

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Med1980

Second Lieutenant
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Feb 3, 2007
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This is not a question, but rather a possible solution for people suffering from an overheating laptop. I am still waiting for my screens for my desktop computer (thanks Dell for taking nearly a month to deliver screens …) so this far I am stuck with a puny Intel laptop. When playing Stellaris the thing quickly reaches 100°C where it gets very badly throttled. Now I have come across a simple solution: underclocking the GPU. This can be done very easily if you have an intel card: "echo 350 > /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/i915_max_freq" in root. This sets the maximum frequency of the GPU to 350 MHz without touching the CPU clock speed. I assume that other Mesa drivers have a sys file to play with. Looking at "turbostat --debug" (note that turbostat needs to be restarted to get the proper GPU frequency for some reason), this cuts the power usage by 10 W and the package temperature appears to settle around a very reasonable 60°C-70°C. I hope this helps.