# GPU temperature skyrocketing at desktop, in apps



## Neffi (Sep 13, 2015)

I'm getting GPU temperatures in the high 90s C consistently. Being that this is a laptop with paltry cooling and an integrated (Intel, Sandy Bridge) GPU, these high temperatures are normal and consistent when the GPU is under very high load, such as when running modern games.

But I'm not loading the GPU. I'm seeing these temperatures while sitting idle at the desktop (Xfce). I tried starting up a bare Xorg session with just TWM loaded and the temperature stayed low, but as soon as I open certain applications, it climbs rapidly. Namely, xfce4-panel, Chrome, Quassel, xfce4-taskmanager. Although not all GTK applications cause issue, I can open up other programs such as GIMP or gtk-demo and the temperature remains normal.

I can't seem to pin down the cause of what's doing this, just that some things consistently make my GPU way too hot for comfort.

This is not at all consistent with the behavior of this GPU under other operating systems. It operates fine under Linux and Windows.

Any recommendations as to where to start diagnosing the cause of this?

On 10.2-RELEASE-p2


----------



## tobik@ (Sep 13, 2015)

You could try adding this to /boot/loader.conf (found here https://wiki.freebsd.org/TuningPowerConsumption#A2._Screen_.2F_Video):

```
drm.i915.enable_rc6=7
```
 I believe this is enabled by default on Linux.


----------



## Neffi (Sep 13, 2015)

tobik said:


> You could try adding this to /boot/loader.conf (found here https://wiki.freebsd.org/TuningPowerConsumption#A2._Screen_.2F_Video):
> 
> ```
> drm.i915.enable_rc6=7
> ...



Thank you. This _seems_ to have got it fixed. 

Is this documented anywhere? Google only turns up links from Linux forums. I checked the cursory places such as the man page for the driver when trying to diagnose the issue, and did not see anything like this mentioned. It really ought to be.


----------

