Cores consistently at 85+ degrees C despite low CPU utilization

Framework Laptop 16 Linux
1

I’ve been having issues with my new FW16 being really slow and even freezing when I have a lot of tabs open (mostly Mozilla + Zoom + maybe Notion or VSCode, depending on the circumstances). It’s brand new and got plenty of storage.

I’ve been trying to troubleshoot and noticed that the CPU cores are consistently really hot when the machine is plugged in–I’m talking 85+ degrees Celsius, and frequently hitting 100C. I’ve set up tab suspension on Mozilla, closed almost all of my programs, and installed autocpu-freq to try to limit this, but it’s still happening. At first I thought it was maybe it was an issue I’ve seen mentioned elsewhere with a single core running hot, but it’s all of them:

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I know other people have reported similar issues on a few different threads (e.g., this doozy). Is this a possible issue with thermal paste or just normal when running Linux? Regularly hitting 100C for routine web browsing seems bad…?

Machine is a FW16 (AMD Ryzen™ 7 7840HS w/ Radeon™ 780M Graphics × 16 w/64GB RAM, no GPU) that I bought only a few months ago. I’m running Ubuntu 24.04, kernel is Linux 6.8.0-45-generic. My BIOS version is 03.03.

2

The Framework 16 uses liquid metal for cooling, and some units do have faulty cooling systems. Can you try restarting and not opening anything except for a performance monitor to see if the CPU temperature rises to very high temperatures?

I would recommend contacting support about this issue. If you can try getting a newer BIOS version that might help as well.

3

Seems to be okay with just the performance monitor open:

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4

One thing I just want to mention is that I’ve tested both autocpu-freq and power-profiles-daemon for finding which provided the best battery life and found that PPD was the winner. Once I learned PPD is the solution that received AMD driver support, it was less surprising. The two are not compatible with one another, only one of them should be ran at a time.

Since it’s all energy in one form or another, better battery life also tends to translate into lower temps.