[RESPONDED] Fan and CPU temperature

I have the i7-1260P, with 32gb of memory, BIOS at 3.05. I’m running Debian Bookworm. If I don’t prop up the back of the laptop, the CPU temperatures get pretty high (according to sensors) and the fan gets irritating. Now that the back is propped up, the temp gets around 60-65C and although the load is only 1.44, my fan is going strong. If I connect to jitsi for a video conference, everyone is asking me to mute because my fan is so loud.

I’m running with the lid open, with a CalDigit USB-C HDMI device attached powering two external monitors. I’ve got thermald running (but not sure what kind of configuration I should be using, and I’m using swayvm.

I’ve gone into the BIOS and did “Load Custom Defaults” because I read here that some people recommended that.

When I boot and look at the CPU temps, they are at 80degress, and the fan is full blast. After things boot up, it goes down to 58C, but the fan is still going.

I’ve gone into powertop and I can’t find anything that is particularly offensive and have made all the tunables read ‘good’

I would recommend you repaste your CPU, it sounds like a symptom of that.
People have noticed far better temperatures with PTM thermal pads especially, so that may also be a possibility!

Otherwise, if you want a short term solution, look into fw-fanctrl as a way of controling the speed of your fans (perhaps at the risk of throttling a bit).
Last option, use TLP to make the CPU use less power at the expense of some performance!

Thanks, I’ve just ordered some PTM 9750 and will give that a try.

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Welcome to the community. I second a re-paste of the CPU. This is a good idea. Using TLP is also an option which will help with fan noise when pushing applications like Jitsi which are going to push on resources a bit and cause the fans to kick up.

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So, I’ve done the re-paste using PTM thermal pads. I think it helped a little bit, but not as much as I would like. The fan is still coming on quite aggressively on a regular basis. I’ve got TLP installed, and I’m wondering if I have it configured correctly. Does someone have a pointer to a good config that works well for this model?

Unfortunately, I don’t know any public TLP configs as it varies a lot based on each users needs. You might want to consider tuning the maximum clock speeds down a bit though (as inefficiency grows exponentially with frequency). Otherwise, making the boost behavior may also help considerably.
I think fw-fanctrl may help you out in this case though with the fan being too aggressive. Just set make the moving average longer.