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hg8
Asked: 2015-09-12 01:29:05 +0800 CST

How to troubleshoot overheating problems?

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I have a 4 year old Acer Aspire 5742G with an Intel Core i5 and 6GB of RAM.

Recently the laptop has started overheating very frequently. On Ubuntu it overheats to the point that it shuts itself down.
Under Windows the computer overheats too, but never to the point of shutting down.

I have no idea where to begin to search for the cause. I am thinking it is maybe because the nVidia GPU is used all the time instead of the Intel iGPU (I am not even sure if it is the case).
Or maybe I have a process that use a lot of CPU?

What I can do to find the overheat cause and troubleshoot it?

Running lspci -k | grep -EA2 'VGA|3D' output :

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)
    Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device 0488
    Kernel driver in use: i915
--
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF108M [GeForce GT 540M] (rev a1)
    Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device 0488
    Kernel driver in use: nvidia
overheating

2 Answers

  1. If you have a four-year old laptop, it makes sense that it's overheating. The likeliest,and easiest, solutions are

    1. Clean the laptop. Get a can of compressed air and blow it in the it intake vents. That might help a little but ideally, you need to open the laptop up and clean the fan and heatsink on the CPU.

    2. Change your thermal paste. You'll need to open the machine, remove the CPU, clean it and then apply fresh thermal paste between the CPU and its heatsink.

    For more details, see How do I correctly apply thermal paste on a laptop CPU with a small surface area?

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  2. Best Answer

    I found the root cause of the overheating. The NVIDIA graphics card was in use all the time.

    I solved the problem by permanently switching to the Intel Chipset. Here what I have done ...

    1. Install nvidia driver:

      sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install nvidia-355

    2. Open Nvidia X Server Settings, go to PRIME Profiles and select Intel (Power Saving Mode)

    This way it is also possible to quickly switch back to the NVIDIA card if needed.

    After a day of testing I can confirm that the NVIDIA card indeed was the cause of overheating.

    Thanks @Pilot6 & @terdon for the direction.

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