[CentOS] Overheating on laptop as compared to RHEL

[Nicolas Thierry-Mieg]

Ned Slider wrote:
> On 14/09/13 16:23, Krishnan V wrote:
>> Hi,
>>    I have an acer 5738g laptop on which i tried out the centos6.4 live CD.
>> The laptop feels noticable hotter and i check the temperature using
>> something like cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/. The temperatures are around
>> 57-60 degrees when the laptop is just idling, ie, just the desktop and the
>> terminal window open. I install lm_sensors using yum and it installs
>> successfully, but there is no noticable reduction in temperature. I have
>> faced this same problem using different varities of gnu/linux
>> distributions: slackware, lubuntu, mandriva and now centos. By a freak
>> chance, i had a chance to run RHEL 5.4 and to my great surprise, the
>> temperature at idling was 43, similar to Windows(which came as default). In
>> fact, the temperature control by rhel was what made me think of trying
>> centos. I tried the lm_sensors configuration on rhel and it was not even
>> able to load the correct modules, yet the temperature control was better.
>> Now, i am not sure if lmsensors are for detecting temperatures only but
>> also for cotrolling temperature.
>
> lm_sensors is indeed for monitoring only. Further, different drivers
> will report different temps so you need to be very careful you are not
> comparing apples with oranges. Even the same driver (e.g, coretemp) can
> report different temps depending if it's an old version in el5 vs a
> newer version in el6. Temperatures are generally relative so monitoring
> is useful to see if the temp goes up or down, but don't necessarily take
> the values as absolute.

it may also depend on your GPU and graphics driver. Do you have a 
discrete GPU in your laptop? If yes, the proprietary driver may help by 
underclocking the GPU when it doesn't impact performance.

For example if you have an nvidia GPU, installing the correct nvidia 
driver will do this if your card supports it.
Set up elrepo and install nvidia-detect, it will tell you which driver 
to install.
http://elrepo.org/tiki/nvidia-detect
Then install it, and run nvidia-settings to see the Powermizer options.