[SOLVED] ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250 Graphics problem ( Otherwise known as Overheating )

[jimmij]

Problem: Overheating (Yes. I know this is in a lot of other forums and threads, but so far none of them found have been able to help).

Symptoms: System heats from 50 degrees on start-up to 90+ degrees very rapidly when playing video, using DeVeDe, LibreOffice at the same time as Firefox, or anything that is graphic intensive such as The Powder Toy. When the temperature rises the graphics become jumpy, system slows, and I excrete a solid mixture of sand, clay, and lime onto my chair.

Assumptions: I believe that the CPU is having to directly handle all graphics without aid of the graphics card. I believe that the graphics card is only handling standard output without sharing in the processing load.

System:
$ uname -a
Linux hal 3.4.3-1.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Mon Jun 18 19:53:17 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
(When trying to install ATI software, I updated the kernel).
Fedora 17, 3.4.2-4.fc17.x86-64 (Previous kernel)
Acer Aspire 5251-1805 Laptop, AMD V120 2.2GHz, 3GB DDR3, 250GB HD, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250 Graphics.

So far in my quest to eliminate the issue, I Switched from Ubuntu Natty Narwhal 64bit to Fedora 17 64bit because Fedora is supposed to work better with Acer.
I installed lm_sensors, it only detected the k10 module which will not output fan speeds or work with fancontrol.
Tried to find a way to make the pcie force the computer to use the system hardware default for controlling the fan rather than the battery saving features that reduce fan power consumption at the cost of cooling. But I looked in the grub.conf files and could not find the options or grub.d file as described in other forums. (See article: w ww.webupd8.org/2011/06/linux-kernel-power-issue-fix.html).
I concluded that it is most likely the graphics card and not the fan at all; and have been trying to no avail to install the proprietary drivers which, as I have read, should solve the problem by distributing the load on the CPU.

Any thoughts?
Do any of you think this will this work? - http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Fed...allation_Guide

One of the major issues that I seem to be running into is finding validity and concordance in multiple answers. I have read a lot of posts from other users and they all seem to differ in method and software support source. So far official channels seem to only be issuing the statement: 'We don't have a fix at this time. We don't know when there will be one. We hope that you are enjoying our product. (Don't call us, we'll call you)'.
So I really don't know what is reliable or who to trust with my system without turning it into a brick. (I can't afford to buy a brand new lap-top computer as a few people suggested [Are they the ones that are going to pay for it?]).
The only thing I have been able to work with at this point is severely limiting the usage time and putting ice packs on the computer.

jimmij

[Haphaeu]

Hi,
not really able to help, but, just to mention that I have similar behaviour and the sympton is graphic driver not working as it should. I play HD video (720p) in windows quite nicely, with processor less than 30%, i.e., GPU is doing its work. But in Linux, processor goes up to 100% and the video performance is poor. At the moment in struggling to get the radeon driver properly installed. I've tried the 'easy' akmod method but was not successful yet. This evening I'll try the proprietary drivers. Btw, my GPU is a Radeon HD 6290.

[Dan]

Title changed to something useful.

[rich1974]

do you really need proprietary driver? what about opensource gallium architecture?

[Agent20]

The AMD/ATI open source driver development so far has been mainly focused on providing 2D/3D support rather than power management and video playback.

You can manually select the graphics power management profiles with the open source driver, see post two in this thread:
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=281276

Using the low power profile should result in a cooler laptop and longer battery life, but will not help with video playback performance.

[jimmij]

Agent20 - Thanks, I will read the thread that you posted. Just on a side-note though, the issue with the video is not playback. I have all the codecs and the video functions just fine until the processor heats up into the high 80's and mid 90's. My critical temperature is 97 degrees. With the hysteresis at 90 degrees, the semiconductors loses the ability to fully gate and that is what leads to my jumpy video. So if i do get a cooler system then everything else should be sorted out.

[rich1974]

but what cause the overheating? it seems there is no hardware problem due to the fact that under W7 it works fine!

[Fenrin]

Uninstall the Catalyst driver. Catalyst version 12.4 and below are not compatible with the xorg version Fedora 17 uses, and newer Catalyst drivers are not compatible with Radeon cards of the 4xxx series.

to uninstall the proprietary driver:

aticonfig --uninstall

or alternatively execute the uninstall script as root

/usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh

(maybe the path is slightly different)

then reinstall mesa-libGL

yum reinstall mesa-libGL

the default Radeon driver has also a powersaving mode.

try one of the following and look if it works (this is also explained here):

echo dynpm > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method

or

echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile

if you want that this command is executed after every reboot add (or if it exists edit) the file /etc/rc.d/rc.local

the content of the file could look like this:

#!/bin/sh
#
# This script will be executed *after* all the other init scripts.
# You can put your own initialization stuff in here if you don't
# want to do the full Sys V style init stuff.
echo dynpm > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method

if you created the file new, you probably have to make it executable:

chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.local

if there is something wrong in this file, it's possible that you can't boot your Fedora 17 anymore. In this case you can remove the file (but above example should work).

[jimmij]

Well, I ran the scripts you reccommended Agent20- and you Fenrin, and set it to be enabled upon boot-up. The system does seem to be running a little cooler at this time. Thanks, I appreciate it. But the system still heats up drastically when I play a Flash video (and no other intensive processes running) the system still heats up into the 90 degree range, just a little slower.
So now my quest is to look into the acpi (I have nothing in my deriectory save the wake-up button) and see if there is something in that sector that is causing it to spike whenever doing graphics or anything related to video. I say anything related to the video because even DeVeDe and FFMPEG conversion cause a spike, and they never used to do that when I was running Ubuntu or Windows. And NO I am not going back to Windows; Also I prefer Fedora to Ubuntu but do so without malice.

[rich1974]

try to make a comparison: play an youtube 1080p video in flash and then, install flashreplacer in firefox and play the same video with standalone vlc or smplayer. you will gonna see that flash cause that overheating.
as you can see, the proprietary linux software made by ati, nVidia, adobe, are not that good as windows versions.

[Fenrin]

do you know if the CPU frequency scaling works correctly?

maybe the tool PowerTop can help you a bit in finding the component which needs more power than it should. There is also a tab "Frequency stats". It shows only the CPU frequency, not GPU. It's also in the fedora repo, so you can easily install it via yum.

whats the output of "dmesg | grep batt"?
it should be something like "Battery Slot [BAT0] (battery present)"
if not: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=280406

[jimmij]

I have installed Powertop and ran it for the results (they are attached as a .txt), but I do not understand what I am seeing. I have looked on their website for usage documentation- no luck. Also, I looked on my system for ACPI, and aside from a file for the lid I seem to have no ACPI. I have found it in the repository; I am just unsure of installing it as I have been hearing mixed reports on its neccesity, usefulness, and compatibility. Most of what I have read deals with reducing power consumption for battery life by reducing fan power; and that just puts me back at my original issue.
I installed upower on someone else's reccommendation, but this is another program that I am wary of. I am sure that my CPU is taking more of a load than the GPU (it's my Engineering Sense tingling), I just need to find out how to switch the load so that flash and movies aren't killing my system with lava-level heat.
So how do I tell what the CPU and GPU are doing in comparision to each other and how do I switch the load? If that is a good idea to begin with...

jimmij

[jimmij]

$ dmesg | grep batt
[ 3.068192] ACPI: Battery Slot [BAT1] (battery present)
I forgot to post this as well.

[jimmij]

Okay, give me the grace that I do suffer from occasional BrainClouds...
During this whole discussion everyone has given me great advice and much help in lowering my CPUs temperature. Unfortunately I could not get it down to proper working order.
Just recently, I was told by a roomate that when my laptop had arrived at the house, the UPS guy (da' b*st*rd) had literally dropped it off.
Upon investigation of this new bit-o-knowledge, I opened the case and found that the CPU heatsink was not resting properly on the CPU or the GPU. I am kicking myself for waiting so long before checking hardware and using up so much of your time (although I am extremely grateful).
Now with the aid of new thermal compund, a few swear words (okay, a lot of 'em at the UPS guy [may he suffer seven years of explosive diarhea]), and your help - I am now running a a nice and cool range of 45C to 65C under medium to middlin' heavy load. (That bit of code on changing the power setting is peach and I am still using it).
So once more: Thank you. You saved my hide.

sin jimm