Bug 666148

Summary: ATI Radeon cards run hot on laptops
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Phil Anderson <pza>
Component: xorg-x11-drv-atiAssignee: Jérôme Glisse <jglisse>
Status: CLOSED DUPLICATE QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: low Docs Contact:
Priority: low    
Version: 14CC: gansalmon, itamar, jonathan, kernel-maint, madhu.chinakonda, mcepl, xgl-maint
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Hardware: Unspecified   
OS: Unspecified   
Whiteboard: [cat:power_mg]
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
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Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2011-07-12 09:57:57 UTC Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Phil Anderson 2010-12-29 07:22:25 UTC 
With the opensource driver, ATI Radeon cards run very hot and the fan runs continuously, resulting in a sizzling laptop and short battery life.  Many users switch to the proprietary drivers to avoid the problems.

By default, the power profile is high power for Radeon cards.  A better default (which gives similar behavior to the proprietary driver) would be to set the power profile to auto, which causes good performance when on power, and low, cooler performance when on battery.

To do this, I put the following in /etc/rc.local:
echo auto > /sys/class/drm/card-0/device/power_profile

There are heaps of mentions of this from users in forums around the place, and a bit of info here:
http://www.overclock.net/linux-unix/731469-how-power-saving-radeon-driver.html
Comment 1 Matěj Cepl 2011-07-12 09:57:57 UTC 

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 682851 ***