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I had earlier been running on Ubuntu 13.04 with the AMD Radeon HD 7670M graphics driver with the driver installed as given in What is the correct way to install proprietary ATI Catalyst Video Drivers (fglrx) directly from AMD?.

Recently i installed Ubuntu 14.04. The AMD support website "http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop?os=Linux%20x86_64#amd-catalyst-packages" shows 2 drivers - their beta driver and the catalyst 14.4 and both show my Radeon HD 7600M series as being supported in the release notes. But when i tried installing either , i am getting an error that my graphics card is not supported.

I even tried the driver i was earlier running on in ubuntu 13.04, but that too is now giving the same error.

Finally i installed a proprietary driver found under Additional Hardware and selected the Intel graphics card under switchable graphics in the catalyst centre. My current laptop temperature is around 61 C and even slightest computations are taking the temp to as high as 72 C .

I donot care about performance - all i care is somehow to reduce my laptop temperature - anyhow - even i tried switching the AMD card off using vgaswitcheroo , but i found that since kernel 3.12 there is dynamic power management and no way to switch the card completely off.

The output of my 

lspci | grep VGA

is as follows now 

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Thames [Radeon HD 7500M/7600M Series] (rev ff)

I donot want to switch back to 13.04 as 14.04 is much better. Also in windows [yes , my laptop is dual booted with windows 8] , the core temp is around 54 .

Please suggest if there is a workaround to somehow control the heating.

Update: I recently got my laptop cleaned by a professional. By cleaning , i mean he took out the fan and manually cleaned it by opening it .. and to my utter surprise the whole fan was almost blocked with dust .. after the cleaning , now the temperature of my laptop is very stable and around 50 C .. i guess the overheating due to radeon drivers was not the root cause ...

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nishkr
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  • Does it overheat if you remove fglrx* and use the open source drivers? Have you tried radeon.runpm=0 as described at How can I disable ATI discrete graphic GPU at startup in Ubuntu 14.04 without BIOS? – bain May 28 '14 at 14:09
  • If you still see this problem with the open source drivers, report it upstream at http://wiki.x.org/wiki/radeon/ – bain May 28 '14 at 14:30
  • Note that the AMD Release notes do not speficy that the drivers support 14.04 - they do show support for 12.x and 13.x – Charles Green May 28 '14 at 15:52
  • @Charles Green the latest amd catalyst 14.6 beta driver for linux supports ubuntu 14.04 and also supports AMD Radeon HD 7600M series .. as given in http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/latest-linux-beta-driver.aspx . – nishkr May 28 '14 at 17:24
  • I'll give them a shot - I am somewhat leary of putting the beta drivers onto my sifes computer: I get enough grief as it is! Currently she's using the open source drivers which work OK - except for the heat issues, and some minor issues with the mouse filckering. – Charles Green May 28 '14 at 19:11
  • Sigh - the beta drivers from AMD did not work for me - something in the HP prevents them from recognizing the hardware... – Charles Green May 29 '14 at 00:37
  • @bain : today i tried removing fglrx completely , then installing the open source driver and finally changing radeon.runpm variable as u had described .. But the problem only became worse , now the temperature rose to 79 C - 83 C .. I immediately shut down ubuntu since. – nishkr May 29 '14 at 13:18
  • What happens if you run the open source drivers without changing radeon.runpm? – bain May 29 '14 at 16:36
  • Tried just now .. initially temperature reduced from above 70 C to around 62 C .. but 5 minutes later the temperature began rising and is now 77 C ... – nishkr May 29 '14 at 17:39
  • @bain : is there any chance i can file a report to amd as their 14.6 stable version release notes says that it will support amd radeon hd 7600M series , but upon installing the driver says the card is not supported ? – nishkr May 30 '14 at 11:00
  • 14.4 is the latest stable and 14.6 (Beta) is the latest beta. The bug tracker for the proprietary catalyst drivers is at http://ati.cchtml.com/ - for the open source drivers the bug tracker is at http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/Radeon/ and there is also a mailing list and IRC channel. – bain May 30 '14 at 14:17
  • btw 77 degrees c might not be an unusual temperature if you are doing any CPU/GPU stuff (?). It really depends on what you are doing and what your system cooling is like. See question which is a normal temperature for a laptop "Normal may be a matter of opinion, but for me, normal is between 50ºC to 70ºC for low usage and up to 80ºC if all the processors are working close to 100%. If somehow the 90ºC are passed I would say that something is wrong." – bain May 30 '14 at 14:25
  • I was finally able to install the beta version catalyst 14.6 .. I followed the procedure given here : https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/AMD#Latest_upstream_beta_and_stable_driver_downloaded_directly_from_AMD.27s_website .. i did get some hiccups about dependency problems and DKMS modules ..but i manually took care of them .. now my laptop's temp. is somewhere around 60-65 .. but thats okay .. Thanks for the help! – nishkr Jun 01 '14 at 11:42
  • The answer to your own question is the cleaning... So answer your own question and I'll vote it up and delete my answer, as I've had the same problem in the past and am now vacuum cleaning my fan at least once/month! – Fabby Nov 23 '14 at 13:43

2 Answers2

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Sorry for the late answer , but I was finally able to install the beta version catalyst 14.6 .. I followed the procedure given here : https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/AMD#Latest_upstream_beta_and_stable_driver_downloaded_directly_from_AMD.27s_website .. i did get some hiccups about dependency problems and DKMS modules ..but i manually took care of them .. now my laptop's temp. is somewhere around 60-65 .. but thats okay .. Thanks for the help!

UPDATE : few months have passed since i installed the latest beta version catalyst 14.6 .. and the temperature is perfectly normal .. around 55-60 C.

nishkr
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As mentioned in the Update the problem was a dirty fan and cleaning it brought the PC back to normal temperatures. Posting this until the user answers his own question and the answer will be valuable to other users.

Personally, I vaccuum clean my fan and air intakes once per month as I had the same problem in the past burning out an NVidia card (luckily under warranty)

Fabby
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