# Laptop hot&slower than expected?!

## JeroenV

Hi,

I have 2 boxes: an Athlon T-bird-900MHz and a Gericom P3-1.1GHz notebook.

Interestingly, it seems that the T-bird compiles XFree and kde significantly faster than the P3 (I even resorted to building binaries for the latter on my T-bird after it didn't build within 24 h or so...)

Moreover it seems that the P3 is (sometimes) much slower than it should be anyway, eg. after several hours usage (?) it seems to get slower. It also is generally very hot, I usually have the notebook lifted to have about 10cm of ventilation space _under_ it.

I was wondering if the overheating could cause the P3 to slow down (AFAIK Intel CPUs have this safety feature?), so I'd like to monitor the actual processor speed; is there a way? (I looked in /proc/cpuinfo etc. but it seems static info)

/proc/cpuinfo

```

processor       : 0

vendor_id       : GenuineIntel

cpu family      : 6

model           : 8

model name      : Pentium III (Coppermine)

stepping        : 10

cpu MHz         : 1096.716

cache size      : 256 KB

fdiv_bug        : no

hlt_bug         : no

f00f_bug        : no

coma_bug        : no

fpu             : yes

fpu_exception   : yes

cpuid level     : 2

wp              : yes

flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse

bogomips        : 2188.90

```

Any ideas/experiences?

Thanks.

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## promethus

Jeroen;

I cant help you with the slow down I'm afraid, although it might be worth looking in the BIOS to see if you can see any options in there, or in /proc/acpi for further information.

I can assure you that Gericom laptops run extremely hot. I have a Advent 5490 (AKA a Gericom webgine) that is about to be replaced under warranty as it has cooked it's own processor. I suspect they do not take heat managment into account with these things, and hope a tiny little fan can deal with the excessive heat generated by the processor. Perhaps it's a selling pitch? Free heated keyboard with every unit....

Michael

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## nillekind

Hi,

if it's a Gericom, then it might probably be the sis630 chipset, which has very bad memory performance. Additionally your desktop harddrive might be much better than the laptop ones. check with hdparm. I don't think the P3 has an overheating feature, that would let it go slower to cool down. And last but not least: GERICOM IS COMPLETE CRAP !  STAY AWAY !

Conner

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## promethus

 *Quote:*   

>  GERICOM IS COMPLETE CRAP ! STAY AWAY ! 

 

Now if only I had known that before I purchased one!  I think the final straw for me was when I phoned the support desk to complain about a fault on the fan.  The BIOS has an enticing option called fan speed, with the option of whisper or performance. By this point the fan noise was driving me insane so I tried both options. Made no difference to the fan at all; it still span at the same speed constantly. In frustration I phoned the Gericom support to complain, and was told that this was a 'feature'. Apparently the processor never actually gets cold enougth to trigger a slow down, so no matter what the speed the bloody fan keeps spinning.

Oh well perhaps it will be replaced by some other no-name laptop with problems...

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## kamikaz3

 *promethus wrote:*   

>  *Quote:*    GERICOM IS COMPLETE CRAP ! STAY AWAY !  
> 
> Now if only I had known that before I purchased one!  I think the final straw for me was when I phoned the support desk to complain about a fault on the fan.  The BIOS has an enticing option called fan speed, with the option of whisper or performance. By this point the fan noise was driving me insane so I tried both options. Made no difference to the fan at all; it still span at the same speed constantly. In frustration I phoned the Gericom support to complain, and was told that this was a 'feature'. Apparently the processor never actually gets cold enougth to trigger a slow down, so no matter what the speed the bloody fan keeps spinning.
> 
> Oh well perhaps it will be replaced by some other no-name laptop with problems...

 

You gotta love intel Centrino

My acer has no fan spinning at all, and it's bloody hot in here (at least for what we have here normal)

As for your real problem, you should know that not only those mhz count.

Not only is the AMD athlon faster per mhz, there can be differences in chipset and memory.

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## JeroenV

Thanks for the different views   :Wink: 

I know the MHz is not the most important, but a factor > 3 difference in compiletime for xfree raises some eyebrows I'd think...

As for the BIOS: there was a choice to get better powersaving, which made the fan more silent, though the CPU ran so hot that it froze the OS but I burnt my fingers on the parallel connector at the back  :Exclamation: 

Anyway, since there is a way to set the speed (for speedstep-aware cpu's ?), there should be a way to monitor it too?

I set all possible speedup features for the hd (IO=32, dma, etc.) but it didn't really help a lot, if at all...

Seems I'll have to consider to keep building on my Athlon...

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## revoohc

if you want to monitor your cpu speed, gkrellm has a pluggin that will do that.  I believe it is called gkx86info, but I could be wrong.  Checkout the gkrellm site since it is not  in emerge.  

Chris

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