Colin Fletcher <colin.m.fletcher@googlemail.com> writes:Could be "turbo" mode? The CPU is clocked at a speed that'll cause it to run too hot if fully loaded, and throttled back when the temperature rises. You can see the current state, and turn it off & on, via: /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo Write '0' there to enable turbo mode, '1' to disable it. Disabling it makes my laptop run a lot cooler. Attached the tiny shell script I use to see & change the setting, in case that's useful.When the module thinkpad_acpi (I suspect dependent on laptop type) is loaded with the option fan_control=1 you can do things like echo level 7|sudo tee /proc/acpi/ibm/fan or echo level disengaged|sudo tee /proc/acpi/ibm/fan (the last one is the loudest and fastest) in order to set a particular fan speed. echo level auto|sudo tee /proc/acpi/ibm/fan resets to temperature-based. My laptop has a thermal design power of 35W and my CPU of 45W, so if I am doing heavy computations, I tend to crank the fan up in advance because it will underestimate where it has to go for a given temperature.
Not necessarily pertinent to the issue, but a few years ago I decided to invest my budget for a new "power" machine into a Dell XPS 15 laptop (i9, 64GB RAM, 2TB NVMI SSD, 16" 4K OLED display). Nominally the CPU can do 5GHz, but I've never had it top 4.6GHz. And hitting that required sitting the laptop on a large five-fan laptop cooler.
So, after too many words, my next
"power" machine *won't* be a laptop. So many new laptops are so
"optimized" to be slim and thin, they have little or no real
cooling capacity. I think even some of those small cases do
better cooling than laptops these days.
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