SpeedStep not working, running hot and noisy

[eidzei]

Hello

I have some trouble with laptop's fan constantly running. I just installed Kubuntu and it's working very well otherwise. I've had several distros installed on this one and am quite sure that something's different now. Temperature is not really problematic - the fan keeps the system at ~45 Celsius when idle. And it is mostly idling.

To me it seems the cores are running at the same frequency all the time. For example:

$ watch -n 0 "lscpu | grep 'MHz'"

CPU MHz: 2494.319

CPU max MHz: 3100,0000

CPU min MHz: 800,0000

Those stay always the same. And:

$ grep MHz /proc/cpuinfo

cpu MHz : 2494.319

cpu MHz : 2494.319

cpu MHz : 2494.319

cpu MHz : 2494.319

I'm pretty sure that cpuinfo tells the real frequency, since it does vary on my other computers and I'm quite sure it did on this one, too. Scaling settings are:

$ cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor

powersave

powersave

powersave

powersave

$ cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_driver

intel_pstate

intel_pstate

intel_pstate

intel_pstate

But even though the CPU seems to be running at full speed, it also seems that the governor is really trying to run it slower, like this:

$ cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq

1077420

1292360

1000642

903888

I have not touched the BIOS settings for some time but I did make sure that Intel's SpeedStep is enabled. There aren't any performance settings in BIOS at all. I haven't installed anything exotic or tweaked much. I did install Intel microcode update using Muon, but that was just in effort to solve this problem. OS: Kubuntu 17.10, hardware: Lenovo L440 laptop, Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4200M CPU @ 2.50GHz, 4 GB, ~180 GB SSD.

Any ideas?

[eidzei]

Added:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="intel_pstate=disable"

-->

$ grep MHz /proc/cpuinfo
cpu MHz : 900.000
cpu MHz : 800.000
cpu MHz : 1800.000
cpu MHz : 900.000

Ok for now...

[vinnywright]

their is a program for Intel i3,i5 and i7 CPU's to monitor wats going on in real time ,,,,it's "i7z"



VINNY

[GreyGeek]

Neat, VINNY! Thanks!

[vinnywright]

Neat, VINNY! Thanks!

your welcome ,,,I was trying for the past few days to report on this find , but the .gif I made to show it in action got me blocked from KFN 3 times when trying to upload it,,,,I kinda lost interest in trying further , my bad .

in KFN's defense the .gif was 20MB in size and Snowhog thinks that maybe the ZB block gave it a false positive as a virus .

I guess I'll go make that thread using the vid I made the .gif from instead through youtube

VINNY