High temperature on my laptop with Radeon Mobility HD4670

As almost everyone here, I guess, in these days I downloaded Quantal Quetzal to give it a try. However I noticed that my laptop runs fairly hot with cooling fans almost always on, even sitting in the desktop doing nothing.

I downloaded XSensor to read temperature sensors, and I saw that while CPU stays on about 65°C, so quiet normal I guess, the GPU sits at 75°C. In comparison my actual Windows 7 installation, which dual boots witb Quantal, stays at 59°C CPU and 65°C. So I went reading and learned that AMD dropped support for my video card from fglrx package, and that fglrx-legacy won't support 1.13 Xorg, so I'm basically stuck with OSS drivers.

So I was guessing if there's anything I can try, and if it's possible that the OSS drivers could be the cause of the high temperature?

Solution 1:

The high temperature is caused by the poor power management of the open source drivers. Installing the latest proprietary drivers would help, if official support for the HD4xxx series hadn't been dropped with Quantal. So you're left with two options:

1.) Install the legacy FGLRX drivers through a custom PPA that ships with an older version of X.ORG.

Advantages: unsurpassed power management, better performance both in 3D and 2D apps ;

Disadvantages: packages provided by user, no guarantee that installation will work, might even break your system

Tutorial

2.) Adjust the power management of the open source drivers.

Advantages: safer option

Disadvantages: neither power management nor performance will be close to the proprietary drivers; this might change in the future, mind you

Tutorial , Making the changes persistent

Solution 2:

Latest proprietary AMD Catalyst driver version 12.9 cannot be used with Ubuntu 12.10 If you have an AMD Radeon HD 2xxx-4xxx series card.

Drivers for these cards are now available in a separate branch called legacy series. Unfortunately these legacy drivers (version 12.6) have not been updated to work with Ubuntu 12.10. Ubuntu 12.10 comes with xorg 1.13 while these drivers have support for older xorg 1.12.

So if you want to install these drivers in Ubuntu 12.10, you have to downgrade to xorg 1.12. A PPA has been provided by Tomasz Makarewicz that includes all the required packages you need to downgrade plus a fglrx-legacy package.

To install these packages, run the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:makson96/fglrx 

sudo apt-get update 

sudo apt-get upgrade 

sudo apt-get install fglrx-legacy

Do note that these packages are not officially supported by Ubuntu, so use them at your own risk. If something goes wrong, you can purge the packages by running following commands:

sudo apt-get install ppa-purge

sudo ppa-purge ppa:makson96/fglrx

SOURCE OF ANSWER