Set i915 to low-power /Reduce thermal throttling

Question

Samsung NP550P5C S02 i5-3210M GT 650M Ubuntu 14.04

Gaming (especially in wine) and bumblebee/primusrun severly degrade performance after a few minutes due to powerclamp throttling!

This is extremely annoying since it didn't happen with nvidia-prime

Before making this a duplicate, i have to say that this didn't help me much: intel_powerclamp: Start/Stop forced idle injection

dmesg

gives me some

[ 4565.419502] intel_powerclamp: Start idle injection to reduce power
[ 4592.479139] intel_powerclamp: Stop forced idle injection

CPU still reaches 85C and intel_powerclamp kicks in severely reducing performance!!

While normal browsing CPU reaches 55-60C.

EDIT: after some searching i noticed that /sys/class/drm/gt_cur_freq_mhz was always 1100 no matter what i did, which is the maximum available.That means there is probably no proper power management for my intel HD 4000!!

So it should probably be the fault of the i915 driver not downclocking my card!! How can i make my intel card conserve power and/or make it downclock?!

Is your severe degrade in performance sudden or gradual? Is your system using the intel_pstate driver in powersave mode? Check via cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_driver and cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor. When performance is degraded what do you get for grep MHz /proc/cpuinfo, when your system is under load? — Doug Smythies, Oct 24 '15 at 16:03
O.K. thanks. You do not appear to have the Clock Modulation problem. — Doug Smythies, Oct 25 '15 at 05:35
i DO know what i have, it's powerclamp throttling... what i ask is how i can reduce it! — philsegeler, Oct 25 '15 at 11:16

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 27 '15 at 17:46

0

Thermald in software center will do it, its a program designed by Intel to take advantage via the pstate and RAPL in kernel. Your temps are high for normal browsing as well. I use nvidia-prime on my laptop and even during heavy browsing or playing movies, my temp never goes over 55. I did a prime test and max temp was 75 on my IV gen i7 before Thermald clamped it down.

answered Oct 27 '15 at 17:46

Arup Roy Chowdhury

1,580

well i DO use thermald but it does nothing... – philsegeler Oct 27 '15 at 17:50
and nvidia-prime gives me low-graphics mode at any driver after nvidia-331 – philsegeler Oct 27 '15 at 17:51
have you tried bumblebee? – philsegeler Oct 27 '15 at 17:53
Add graphics ppa, do a sudo apt-get --purge remove *nvida and install 352 with nvidia prime from ppa and see if the issue goes away. The ppa can be found at https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa – Arup Roy Chowdhury Oct 28 '15 at 05:49
i said before that nvidia-prime gave me no problems ... with nvidia-331, BUT as soon as i upgraded to nvidia-340 i booted into low-graphics. I tried 346 and 352 and still the same!! So i am stuck with bumblebee, unless i can find a way to install prime without this annoying issue!! – philsegeler Oct 28 '15 at 13:32
Did you do a complete purge of old nvidia drivers and removed the xconfig file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf – Arup Roy Chowdhury Oct 28 '15 at 15:17
well i did sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia*, then installed the driver from Additional Drivers! – philsegeler Oct 28 '15 at 15:22
that's how i installed nvidia-331 – philsegeler Oct 28 '15 at 15:22

Set i915 to low-power /Reduce thermal throttling

1 Answers1