Laptop overheating when closed and charging

Community Support
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1

System information and related issue (unresolved as far as I know).

Recently, as in the past 2 months, I’ve noticed my laptop has been having potentially dangerous overheating issues. I’ve had the laptop for over a year now, and it only gets light use (usually my device to remote into work or watch youtube). This is extremely worrying as it seems it may get so hot the device could have a catastrophic failure and result in a fire. I have never had this issue before

What happens is that I will close the lid or manually put it into sleep mode, and put it away (always in a breathable location, often on hardwood table or wooden shelf). I will come back some time later and the bottom section near the battery/ above the keyboard, below the hinge, will be so hot to the touch you would have trouble touching the heated part for long. The fan is not running, and the laptop itself is stuck on a black screen, presumably bc it has locked itself up due to overheating. I’m able to force a shutoff by holding the power button and turning it back on will allow the fans to kick in and cool fairly quickly. I experienced this issue before and after updating the firmware, so I doubt that update is the culprit.

Anyone else recently encountering this issue or found a solution? The related thread seems to be dead with the last activity in 2023 with no resolution as far as I can see…

2

This is caused by notorious modern standby on Windows, which is known to use full CPU power on background tasks even when sleeping. The solution is to hibernate on lid close or switch to Linux.

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But why would it be able to use the CPU while keeping the fans off? That sounds like a severe bug to me.

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Why? It throttles long before destroying itself. The bug is windows doing stuff when it is supposed to be sleeping but I suppose that’s a conceptual question.

5

I just did a quick test. I was playing minecraft with shaders on high setting. Then I shut the lid, the fan switched off while the computer was still very hot. However since I’m on Linux, my USB power meter showed the power went down to <1W within seconds so the computer won’t overheat. Then I opened up the lid before the laptop cooled down “naturally” over time, the fan went back up to before I closed the lid.

The AMD7040U series doesn’t support ACPI S3

$ cat /sys/power/mem_sleep
[s2idle]

meaning Linux still can only use S0ix the so-called “low power idle” but won’t use CPU. Unlike S3, in S0ix, the CPU is not physically powered off, it’s up to the software for reducing the idle power (can be S0i1~S0i3). Therefore in my test case, the fan is off while sleeping and since S3 is not available, the Linux’s software “decided” to not work during sleep.

On Windows, if you AFK for a while you can hear the fan spinning until you move the mouse manually, which is a bit creepy. Since S0ix does not physically power off the CPU, it perceived as AFK by Windows. Normally AFKing won’t stop the fan, however, for some reason, the fan can be powered off, as you said, very likely to be a bug.