hi everyone

i just ran into this overheating+shutdown issue with an amilo a1650
laptop, mobile sempron 3100+ (800, 1600,1800 MHz steps), gentoo 2.6.24
and 2.6.28-r10. in my case this was clearly a problem related to
horrific thermal paste situation. afaik nobody has touched the cpu+hsf
since the machine came from factory some years ago, but the cpu idle
temperature was 56 C @ 800MHz. using performance or ondemand governor
the cpu temperature would almost immediately skyrocket to 100+ C and the
machine would almost immediately power off.

before, this laptop had run windows xp for a almost 2 years now where it
also exhibited some occasional freezes and shutdowns, although it would
not do it so abruptly, and freezes also seemed to be related to which
Mobility Radeon 200M IXP video driver i would use (the newer, the
worse!). but overall it would be in a working condition, although you
could visibly see (ProcExp) it would throttle to 800 MHz way too often
and bog down any task which hogged the cpu for any period of time.

yesterday i opened heatsink up and saw the thermal paste was in a
terrible situation, as in it looked like nothing you would expect from a
decent thermal paste application - hardened into pieces, scattered
around the core, with random blobs stuck on the heatsink. applied some
arctic cooling mx-1 and voila - it looks to have a worked. cpu idle
temperature was 36 C after booting up, stabilizing at around 45 C @ 800
MHz after staying on for a while. i'm using ondemand governor, so 800
MHz is the usual working speed. in performance situations, the
temperature does ratchet up double and more, but thanks to decent
thermal paste, the fan has more time to kick in at higher speed and now
the maximum temperature during 'make bzImage' was 98 C for a second. the
cpu does get automatically throttled down to 800 MHz at high
temperatures with performance governor, then switched up again at around
65-70C.

i also and monitored and graphed it (attached).

as you can see, these crappy low end laptops are just not very good
performance or gaming machines. the cpu burns up easily and hardware has
to scale back the MHz, killing any chance at high performance for
extended periods. fortunately this one will do nothing sit idle most of
the time with office work, so 800 MHz with occasional bump-up should
work fine from now on. but obviously it's a worrying sign that coming
out the factory, it was ill-prepared to do even that. googling "amilo
overheat" is a clear indicator of that.

** Attachment added: "graph of cpu temperature + mhz during make bzImage"
   http://launchpadlibrarian.net/27519670/cpu.png

-- 
CPU overheats during high usage "throttling <not supported>"
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/22336
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