Hello Penguins,
I’m looking for distro advice. For the last 4-5years I have rocked this laptop, MSI PS63 Modern RC. I have tried Debian, Garuda, Ubuntu, and now currently rocking Tumbleweed. Although I am statisfied with the current choice of distro, my laptop still overheats like crazy whenever its preasured even slightly, for example: doing updates, being on zoom for uni, or ofc low-end gaming.
I realise the laptop is old, but i really want it to last half a year longer before i start working for a company, which then will replace my need for having a personal laptop.
So, should I try a more lightweight distro or do you think the problem lies elsewhere? I’ve had the same issue across all other distros i’ve tried. I’ve looked at trying Alpine and MicroOS from openSUSE.
Appriciate any pointers!
Honestly the best thing you can do is to remove and reapply thermal paste to the CPU / GPU. Go for something with a high thermal conductivity. There are plenty of videos online on reapplying thermal paste and that will definitely cool off your laptop when done correctly as it increases heat transfer to your heat sinks and fans.
I’ll defo have to do this then, seems like the most probably cause of the system overheating. Thank you
The operating system in use shouldn’t be a factor. Consider opening your laptop to perform a thorough cleaning, and also consider replacing the thermal paste as well. If you’re not comfortable doing this yourself, taking it to a repair shop is a viable option. Investing in a cooling stand for the laptop would also be beneficial…
I’m alot on the go so don’t think there is a practical enough cooling stand for me, but thanks 🌻
Replacing the thermal paste is essential. It dries out over time and stops conducting heat effectively. Cleaning the fans and radiator fins is important too. Takes an hour or so if you don’t know what you’re doing so shouldn’t take long. I’ve kept my laptop going for years by doing that every 2 years or so.
There are some slim battery operated cooling stands listed on Amazon. Not sure how well they’d work, but they are always an option…
I have almost the same laptop (PS63 8M, without any nVidia dGPU).
One of the issues I had to solve was the touchpad spamming interrupts after waking up from sleep. It would keep one core at 100% indefinitely, keeping CPU frequency (and temps) quite high and burning through the battery.
Here’s the fix: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1865745#p1865745
This behavior seems fixed on modern kernels since I’ve installed Fedora recently and didn’t have to do this workaround, but you can still check if this still applies to you.
You might also check if you can disable the dGPU in the BIOS (can’t check since I don’t have one), and/or play with power profiles either through Gnome or tlp (lower power profiles will make your laptop very sluggish though).
Maybe check if both your fans are running. I had to replace one of mine that was starting to fail a year ago.
Other than that, I’ve never had any overheating issues with this laptop.
I will definitely check this out, merci 🌼
De rien ;)
A lightweight distro won’t help you since gaming and zoom will still consume the same amount of resources.
Whatever your distro/DE needs to run itself isn’t even a drop in the ocean compared to your browser for example.I sounds like you have to apply new cooling paste. This might be a pain to do on a laptop but certainly worth it. Another distro probably won’t do the trick, whether it’s minimal or not.
Yeah it seems so, will try to get it done soon 👌
Have you tried running themald?
No have not heard of this before, will try it asap
Lots of cleaning advice, but let me add this bit: If you crack it open and use a can of air on it, unplug the CPU fan first. Super easy if you’ve gone that far.
Okidoki 👍
And before using a can of fresh air, look into an electronics fan. Compressed air doesn’t actually play nice with electronics
The issue isn’t with Linux directly so any distro you use will do the same.
It could be a hardware issue that the machine is not dissipating heat.
Or it could be that you need some kind of driver/controller software for fan. It sounds like the system isn’t properly controlling the fan. It leaves it low when it doesn’t defect usage but when it does, instead of increasing the fan a little bit at a time, it just goes full tilt to be safe. It probably cannot read the temperature sensors and so has no idea whether your need cooling or not.
I don’t know the answer but do some googling around system temperature reading on that model and see if there is a module you need to install.
How do you mean that its overheating? My GF says the same about her laptop, but its just cooling itself off. Does yours freeze or start slowing down a lot? Are you monitoring temps and see that they’re beyond your CPU acceptable range (usually 90C, IIRC)?
Yeah, the system totally slows down quite a bit, everything from the browser to my IDE uses quite a bit of time to load.
If you are seeing temps out of spec for your CPU, its not unheard of for thermal paste to dry or even shift if the laptop has been through some chassis strain. Could be worth a careful examination.
WDYM by “overheat”?
In addition to the basic hardware care (checking for dust, reapplying thermal compound if necessary) you can run powertop to check what is keeping your CPU awake when it shouldn’t and take steps to purge unneeded services or resource-heavy applications.
Thanks wasnt aware of this resource, will get it :)
I have a Gigabyte Clevo thingy, so take what I say with a grain of salt. My laptop has a i5 11 gen intel cup, and it doesn’t have the cooling for my cpu. I don’t know if this is a bug in Linux, or a fault in the pc (probably both). So when I play games it spikes to 80-90C then throttles.
So what I did was look into software that lets me control the CPU frequency, which led me to Slimbook Battery. This software is amazing and lets me tune the power usage of my cpu to manage the thermals.
I believe Open Build has a package of Slimbook Battery for Opensuse Tumbleweed, but I’ve had no luck running it. On my Manjaro install it works excellently.
deleted by creator
Uh thanks?
The fan in my Toshiba laptop once died… Make sure that isn’t your problem and replace it if it is
