My laptops motherboard was fried recently due to overheating. I closed the lid which put it into standby and set it in my bag. When I pulled it out, the laptop was very hot and it did not function properly anymore. I have recently added a new mobo, but I would like to make sure it doesn’t happen again. I am wondering if there is any way for me to access some form of logs at the moment of the failure and to see what program(s) where overloading my system. I am using 12.3 on a 64bit system.
On Sun, 13 Oct 2013 00:36:02 +0000, 8ofspades wrote:
> My laptops motherboard was fried recently due to overheating. I closed
> the lid which put it into standby and set it in my bag. When I pulled it
> out, the laptop was very hot and it did not function properly anymore. I
> have recently added a new mobo, but I would like to make sure it doesn’t
> happen again. I am wondering if there is any way for me to access some
> form of logs at the moment of the failure and to see what program(s)
> where overloading my system. I am using 12.3 on a 64bit system.
I’m not sure about logs, but if you put it in standby, then it shouldn’t
have overheated. I have noticed with my laptop, though, that sometimes
it hangs going into standby, s you might check and make sure that it
actually did go to standby when you closed the lid.
How would I be able to check that? I’ve also noticed that it would randomly overhead during very low load, and It wouldnt stop unless I restarted. I’m guessing that might also have something to do with it.
On Sun, 13 Oct 2013 02:06:02 +0000, 8ofspades wrote:
> How would I be able to check that?
If your laptop, like mine and my wife’s, has an indicator that tells you
when it’s properly asleep (my laptop’s power indicator fades on and off,
and my wife’s, IIRC, blinks slowly). Another thing to check is if the
fan kicks on.
> I’ve also noticed that it would
> randomly overhead during very low load, and It wouldnt stop unless I
> restarted. I’m guessing that might also have something to do with it.
Possibly. What type of video controller is in the laptop in question?
Low CPU load might be offset by high GPU load, or (as I see with the ATI
controller in my wife’s laptop on occasion) when watching videos or
sometimes just when Chrome is running, the CPU spikes and the fan kicks
in.
On Sun, 13 Oct 2013 03:47:43 +0000, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Sun, 13 Oct 2013 02:06:02 +0000, 8ofspades wrote:
>
>> How would I be able to check that?
>
> If your laptop, like mine and my wife’s, has an indicator that tells you
> when it’s properly asleep (my laptop’s power indicator fades on and off,
> and my wife’s, IIRC, blinks slowly). Another thing to check is if the
> fan kicks on.
Another idea would be to try suspending it without closing the lid
(s2ram, as I recall, should kick that off) and see what happens.
When properly suspended to RAM, the CPU shouldn’t be doing anything at
all - that you’re having heat issues after suspending it tells me that
it’s not suspending properly.
> When properly suspended to RAM, the CPU shouldn’t be doing anything at
> all - that you’re having heat issues after suspending it tells me that
> it’s not suspending properly.
And if the machine did suspend, there would be no logs at all.
This has happened to many(?) people. They hibernate or suspend their
machines, then put them in their bags on a hurry without waiting for it
to really stop, or come back with an error. My laptop manual did in fact
warn about this error.
Another possibility is BIOS bug. I had a desktop machine that when
suspended stopped the fan of the cpu (expected and normal), but the CPU
remained active somehow. The CPU became very hot. But this occurrence
would be very strange on a laptop.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4, with Evergreen, x86_64 “Celadon” (Minas Tirith))
Seen this on an NVIDIA Optimus config. The NVIDIA card stayed active on suspend/hibernation. The owner guessed he suspended with an application (blender) still using the NVIDIA, but even then it should work.
On 2013-10-13 14:46, Knurpht wrote:
>
> Seen this on an NVIDIA Optimus config. The NVIDIA card stayed active on
> suspend/hibernation. The owner guessed he suspended with an application
> (blender) still using the NVIDIA, but even then it should work.
But that is terrible! :-/
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4, with Evergreen, x86_64 “Celadon” (Minas Tirith))
Possibly. What type of video controller is in the laptop in question?
Low CPU load might be offset by high GPU load, or (as I see with the ATI
controller in my wife’s laptop on occasion) when watching videos or
sometimes just when Chrome is running, the CPU spikes and the fan kicks
in.
It has a sandybridge i5 with integrated graphics. It will sometimes overheat when I am just surfing the web or watching videos like you said. However I checked the system monitor and the cpu load was low. Since the graphics is integrated, wouldn’t gpu load be included with the processor load? At this point it seems like it didn’t properly go to sleep, and my issue with it randomly overheating happened at the worse possible moment. Would it be possible to have some sort of program that immediately cuts power to the system if the processor reaches a certain temperature?
On 2013-10-13 20:26, 8ofspades wrote:
>
>>
>> If the machine is asleep, the processor can not run any program.
>
> Does this mean that there is no voltage to the processor? In my case I
> think it did not go into sleep properly and then the cpu overheated.
There may be some voltage on some parts of the CPU. That much detail I
do not know. But it is suppossed to be sleep, it certainly can not run
processes.
i
Something went certainly wrong on your machine.
Maybe the system failed to sleep at all. Or it awakened later. In that
case, with the CPU fully running, yes, absolutely, if the CPU overheated
it should have powered off completely. This is dependent on the bios and
the motherboard, I believe. I know for a fact that this does not work on
some machines, specially old machines.
The other theory is that your machine did sleep, but not completely,
some part of it did not. Perhaps the graphic card.
In any case, I never suspend the machine and pack it: I hibernate.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4, with Evergreen, x86_64 “Celadon” (Minas Tirith))
On Sun, 13 Oct 2013 16:16:02 +0000, 8ofspades wrote:
> It has a sandybridge i5 with integrated graphics. It will sometimes
> overheat when I am just surfing the web or watching videos like you
> said.
My laptop is an i7 with sandybridge (IIRC) and yeah, I sometimes see that
as well. I’m on 12.2 here on that system, so it seems that there may be
something in the intel driver.
> However I checked the system monitor and the cpu load was low. Since the
> graphics is integrated, wouldn’t gpu load be included with the processor
> load?
I don’t think so, no. The GPU is still a “separate” processing unit from
the CPU cores, and the architecture as I understand it doesn’t use the
CPU to perform graphics operations.
In any case I think we all agree that the cpu was on in some capacity for it to be able to overheat. At that point would I be able to have a program that could shutdown my computer if it overheats?
On Sun, 13 Oct 2013 21:06:03 +0000, 8ofspades wrote:
> In any case I think we all agree that the cpu was on in some capacity
> for it to be able to overheat.
Very likely, yes.
> At that point would I be able to have a
> program that could shutdown my computer if it overheats?
Not really, because if it’s hanging during suspend, then no software is
running or can run. That’s the underlying issue, I think - something
gets wedged up during the suspend and drives the CPU up while actually
doing nothing.
The best thing to do is test as I suggested and see if you can duplicate
the issue without closing the laptop lid - that might help determine what
the problem is.
You might also try suspend to disk, since that actually does remove power
from the system (and thus is easier to tell if it’s hung up during
suspend).
All right, I’ll try to run it as much as possible to see if the issue comes up again. It could have just been a bad mobo on the old one, but I don’t want to risk it until I have a pretty good understanding of whats going on.