[GRLUG] does Debian run cooler than Ubuntu or am I just crazy?

[Michael Mol]

On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 8:55 AM, John-Thomas Richards <jtr at jrichards.org> wrote:
> On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 02:44:58PM -0400, Michael Mol wrote:
>> On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 2:39 PM, John-Thomas Richards <jtr at jrichards.org> wrote:
>> > On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 02:06:18PM -0400, Michael Mol wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Believe it or not, your GPU does a *lot* more work than your CPU does,
>> >> at least if you're among the majority of folks who use hardware
>> >> acceleration for anything (2D *or* 3D).  Vista introduced dwm, a
>> >> compositing window manager much like Compiz.
>> >
>> > I'm running Compiz with Debian, but it's still not as polished feeling
>> > as Ubuntu.  I'm cool with that, though.
>> >
>> >> If your laptop is overheating, you probably ought to get the dust
>> >> cleaned out of it; I'd wager you've got a couple heat sinks in there
>> >> that would work a lot better if you did.
>> >
>> > The laptop overheated with Vista when it was brand new.  I'm sure dust
>> > is affecting it some now, but it wasn't dusty when we bought it.  Still,
>> > I'll give it a shot.
>>
>> I suppose you might have a badly seated heat sink. Other possibilities
>> include a cruddy fan, bad fanspeed controller settings (should be
>> tunable, either in BIOS or by some daemon), accidental positional
>> blocking of airflow intake or exhaust, or simply an incredibly badly
>> designed piece of hardware.
>>
>> If you disable Compiz entirely, that should also help. With an old
>> laptop of mine, I found it helpful to add an additional rigid bottom
>> to it, to guarantee space between its air intake and whatever it was
>> sitting on.
>
> I use a laptop cooling pad with it.  The single-fan Belkin appears to be
> the best cooler on the market as it actually blows air at the laptop so
> the laptop's internal fans can suck in air more easily and then blow out
> the hot air.  Most other cooling pads suck air away from the laptop and
> compete with the laptop's fan(s) for airflow.

I've had something like that. I thought it was crap, and did't provide
any more benefit than a guaranteed standoff. If I wanted to use
something like it again, I'd probably create some kind of seal to
channel the fan output of the pad to the intake of the laptop.

>
> Switching to Debian resulted in about a 30° drop in normal operating
> temperature.  Blowing out dust in the fan seems to have dropped it
> another 20° or so.  The dust makes sense; I'm still amazed at the
> temperature difference between Debian and Ubuntu.  Now I'm considering
> replacing Ubuntu with Debian on my wife's Aspire One.

My money is still on greater usage of the GPU. What are the
before/after numbers for disabling Compiz on Ubuntu?

Also, with some graphical chipsets, it's possible to adjust the GPU
clock rate. I helped a cousin overclock his laptop's GPU (at his
insistence. And I warned him it would cause problems. He burned his
lap anyway...), and *underclocking* is still very much an option. (I
once had a laptop that I kept underclocked to deal with overheating
issues.)

Another possibility is disk heat, but that's a harder thing to do a
good direct analysis on. My Acer laptop did overheat its hard drive
once when I ran a disk performance tool on it, but that's as close as
I've come to real data. An SSD *might* run cooler, but I don't know.

-- 
:wq