When gaming on my Linux laptop (Asus Zephyrus M15 2020) the thermals can get quite alarming. The CPU hits 95C very quickly. Disabling a couple of cores didn’t seem to do much good, though turning off turbo mode on the Intel i7-10750hq got it down to the 85C - 90C range when gaming.
Is there anything else I can do to cool this puppy off? It doesn’t run this hot in Windows…
The cpu might share the same cooler with the gpu and you probably need to tune down both to get some temp difference, there might be a software in windows that came with drivers that does that automatically.
My understanding is that it will be ok. The thing is its a thin gaming laptop, its going to be hot and never have “enough” cooling. That is because it is tuned to run as fast as it can within the specified temperature limits. The way to get to what you want is to cripple your laptop performance to such a level that it makes no sense to have that machine. I would suggest taking the back off and insuring there is no dust clogging it up and understanding that it is working within design limits. Its not going to be cool like a larger proper gaming laptop or a desktop.
And yes, AdmiralPuni is correct, the heat sinks are tied together so trying to micromanage the heat of the 2 components will be very difficult.
Keep it clean, Make sure it has as much access to fresh air as much as possible, and maybe think about putting it on a laptop cooler to try and help, but shy of liquid metal, major modifications, or crippling the performance bad enough to make it questionable if it was worth buying such an expensive laptop even worth it.
You might want to ad the word “Linux” to your topic title, in order to attract the correct kind of advice. Also you might want to mention which distro you are using.
In general, undervolting may help you. By reducing voltage to the cpu (and maybe gpu), you allow it to run cooler. Sometimes the cpu can run faster when undervolted (due to less thermal throttling).
As for how to undervolt, that’s the part where “Linux” and your distro might help the helpers.
That’s the amusing thing…it’s marketed as having liquid metal applied at the factory. After exploring options in the BIOS I did discover an option to toggle hyperthreading off. That should help some, while hopefully not crippling performance too much. Another thing that has helped is not using Feral’s gamemode utility. That seems to crank the CPU right up to 5 GHz and it attempts to pin it there.
As for the distro I’m using it is Fedora 34. I am also using a custom kernel and tools to manage the laptop’s cooling and performance. (See https://asus-linux.org/.) Unfortunately these tools don’t offer fine grained control of the laptop’s fans, mostly just max blast or whisper quiet. When I get a chance I will take the bottom off the laptop and inspect for dust. The system has been with me for a year, so it may well have accumulated some detritus.
I’ve also been doing some more testing in windows and found that even in Wintel land the laptop can still get quite toasty, though it usually takes longer to reach T-junction than Linux does.
Aside from potential thermal damage, there’s another reason I’m interested in thermals. This happened not too long ago:
So the thermals represent a hazard not only to the mainboard, but to my wrist and arm as well…
cpufreq or some other freq software. Some have gui available aswell, lower/limit the frequencies on cpu/gpu, problem solved.
If not make sure the laptop has available room for a proper intake of air, so the exhausts actually works as intended, many laptop issues with heat arise from not having a proper intake, with frequency limiter software by the side it should do even better
cough
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did you repaste it? I remember something stupid coming out about random laptops fr intel not being pasted correctly. Might be a check.
That laptop seems to be as thick as a MSI GS63. Take a look at swapping out the fans and see if theres a heatsink kit online. I know there is for 8000 series intel laptops that were designed stupidly, otherwise just wait for one.
In the meantime, these are neat.
It’s probably been tuned via drivers/firmware for windows. You can try adjusting voltages with the distro for both the CPU and GPU. If that doesn’t help then just game in Windows. Not really worth damaging the CPU.
There are few tools you can use Intel makes an open source called thermald: GitHub - intel/thermal_daemon: Thermal daemon for IA
I use thermald on my laptop and it helped out.
Alright I may have found a better solution than simply disabling turbo mode. The following command makes the fans run full blast and caps the CPU at 3.75Ghz:
$ asusctl profile -t true -f boost -M 75asusctl is a utility from https://asus-linux.org that can control various EFI related features of the laptop. The “-M 75” sets CPU scaling to a max of 75% which should be roughly 3.75 GHz.
LOL I actually had one of these, but for ExpressCard laptops. It was very problematic, perhaps due to poorly shielded cabling. Anyway hopefully limiting the CPU to 3.7GHz will work
I’d just disable it and used a connected gpu.
Blowing out the fin stack has helped thermals some in Windows (now staying between 85 - 90C @ 4.2 - 4.5 GHz) in gaming and stress tests. But now the Linux desktop is locking up after only a couple of minutes. Tried both GNOME and Cinnamon.
Not sure if this a bad update or a hardware issue. Windows seems happy, so I’m kind of doubting the latter.