Hi,
I have a notebook with an ATI mobility FireGL 5200 and use the radeonhd driver. The graphic card gets very hot, I guess the GPU clock is at it’s max default value all the time. As I do not run any 3d apps under opensuse, i’d like to reduce that heat by underclocking it. Is it possible with the radeonhd driver?
I’m not facing an overheating problem, it’s just about reducing unnecessary heat, which is as high as what I get with ATI drivers for Windows under maximum load (80°C vs 55°C without 3D applications).
rovclock doesn’t work with my card.
I know there’s also a ‘radeon’ driver which supports dynamic clock scaling, what would i have to do to use it instead of radeonhd?
I’d rather not try to use the fglrx driver because I’ve found contradictory information on the official ATI website about whether the mobility fireGL v5200 is supported, and I have no idea how to revert the effect of the one-click install in case it doesn’t work.
You should try with ATI proprietary, unless you are opensource purist.
Once you install it you can revert it easily.
Anyways, after one-click-install you should ran SAX, and with same command you can revert (just say which driver you want to use).
So, in terminal, as root, type:
sax2 -r -m 0=fglrx (for ATI)
sax2 -r -m 0=radeon (for opensource radeon)
you just change 0=… with which driver you want to use.
ok, so if it doesn’t work i can just type:
sax2 -r -m 0=radeonhd
and things will be exactly as before the proprietary driver installation? no risk that i somehow destroy the open source drivers? I’m still quite windows-minded, so i was sure that installing the fglrx driver erases the radeonhd driver.
I installed the fglrx driver. The installation was quite awkward, because after running the one click install, I logged out, which was a bad idea. I had a black screen instead of the login screen. ctrl+alt+f1 didn’t work. i managed to reboot by pressing the power button, this tells the machine to shut down normally (no brutal reset). After the restart, black screen and ctrl+alt+f1 still didn’t work. I booted in failsafe mod, black screen but ctrl+alt+f1 switched to a terminal in text mode where i ran init 3 ; sax2 -r -m 0=fglrx ; init 5 , then everything went ok, the installation was finally successful.
The result is that I have 3D support but my graphic card is even hotter and the CPU is cooler.
Now I’ll have a look at the options of the fglrx driver.
Is it possible that running KDE4 loads the GPU to the max? That would explain the high temperature.
the radeonhd driver was working better, I’d like to switch to it again but
sax2 -r -m 0=radeonhd
doesn’t work, sax loads and doesn’t do anything, i have to close it with ctrl+c.
Do I have to uninstall the ATI software first?
I eventually managed to go back to the radeonhd driver. I wanted to get rid of fglrx because Matlab wouldn’t run anymore, the GPU was even hotter, actually it didn’t really work with my card because none of it’s features (e.g. reading, setting frequencies) would work and kde went so slow it actually crashed after activating desktop effects. My graphic card would also do some loud high pitched noise and dangerously overheat while running glxgears, hence the 3D acceleration I could activate with fglrx was of no use.
To use the radeonhd driver again I just had to uninstall the fglrx software (sax2 -r -m 0=radeonhd didn’t work with fglrx software installed), i reinstalled radeonhd to be sure i’ll use an inaltered version, and restarted X. This has automatically restored my original xorg.conf and I didn’t have to do anything more to restore my original configuration.
So I guess I’ll just forget that whole reducing-GPU-temperature thing, because the radeon driver seems not to work with this card, so I have no more options.
I’d however like to understand those temperature differences. Could it be that running KDE4 represents much work for my graphic card whereas running the Windows desktop just lets it idle? That would be consistent with the shorter battery lifetime under openSUSE (which I, luckily, do care about).
well, now you know options, now you gained expirience, hard way, which is good as you will know no barriers anymore.
So, you are ‘initiated’. What rests is to experiments what works best for your case.