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aatish
Asked: 2011-10-16 11:49:31 +0800 CST

Why is the NVIDIA GPU so hot?

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I have just installed 11.10 and installed the recommended driver for NVIDIA (230M). The current driver installed is 280.13.

The temperature of the card is 85°C. I have tried using LXDE and Unity 2D, but the temperature does not drop. Once it did drop to 76°C, but even that's quite a lot.

Is there a fix to this? Do you think downgrading my driver would help? If so, how should I go about it?

unity

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The options initially available for additional drivers were as follows:

    1. Nvidia accelerated graphics driver(version current) [Recommended]
    2. Nvidia accelerated graphics driver(post-release updates)(version current-updates)

    Initially I had installed 1. using which caused high temperature.Now, I have installed 2. I am not entirely sure if it was only because of the driver but doing this did solve it.

    I hope someone explains as to what is the difference between the two clearly. This fixes the problem.

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  2. Had the same problem with my Dell XPS L501X with GeForce GT 435M reporting temperatures of 96 - 97 and even touching 100 at one time resulting in shutdown.

    sudo apt-get install nvidia-current-updates seems to have resolved it for now. Every Ubuntu update 10.04 - 10.10 -> 11.04 -> 11.10 i have been facing this temp problem.

    UPDATE : Was still facing high GPU temperatures when i realized that the the air vents might be filled with dust. Blew some air with my vacuum in short bursts and voila! the temperature hovers around 60-70. With skype audio/video and youtube, it does go up to 73 but that's a long way down from the 90-96 i was facing earlier.

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