Better Fan Control Support Coming To The Open-Source Radeon Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Better Fan Control Support Coming To The Open-Source Radeon Driver

Alex Deucher of AMD has put out new Radeon DPM patches that add SMC fan control support for SI/CI GPUs. These new patches should reduce the graphics card's fan noise on systems with a higher default fan profile speed...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTg0NDM

[schmidtbag]

*sigh* and I'm still sitting here using the 3.17 kernel. But when it comes time to get one of these new kernels, it will be nice considering I felt my fans were already pretty quiet. Though personally I'd be a little more interested in lowering the idle clock speeds. My R9 290 runs around 50C when idle right now, which is weird if the fan speeds are actually at 40%. So far it seems to stay around the mid to low 70s when under load.

Out of curiosity, does anybody know what would trigger the clock speeds to increase from the idle speed? I don't think my clock rates have been increasing outside of games but maybe they do for small bursts of other activities, like scrolling a web page or moving a window around, and that may explain my higher temperatures.

[agd5f]

*sigh* and I'm still sitting here using the 3.17 kernel. But when it comes time to get one of these new kernels, it will be nice considering I felt my fans were already pretty quiet. Though personally I'd be a little more interested in lowering the idle clock speeds. My R9 290 runs around 50C when idle right now, which is weird if the fan speeds are actually at 40%. So far it seems to stay around the mid to low 70s when under load.

Out of curiosity, does anybody know what would trigger the clock speeds to increase from the idle speed? I don't think my clock rates have been increasing outside of games but maybe they do for small bursts of other activities, like scrolling a web page or moving a window around, and that may explain my higher temperatures.

The clk increases are tiggered by GPU load. There is a debugfs entry for monitoring them and there are sysfs entries for forcing the performance level within a power state. See this blog post: http://www.botchco.com/agd5f/?p=57

Idle power is somewhat higher than it should be due to some of the gfx block clockgating features not being enabled by default at the moment in the open source driver.

[mannerov]

Does that concern laptops too ?

When using my Amd secondary gpu, it can get quite hot, but the fan (shared for cpu and gpu) won't spin. However it will spin If I use the Intel gpu intensively.

[schmidtbag]

The clk increases are tiggered by GPU load. There is a debugfs entry for monitoring them and there are sysfs entries for forcing the performance level within a power state. See this blog post: http://www.botchco.com/agd5f/?p=57

Idle power is somewhat higher than it should be due to some of the gfx block clockgating features not being enabled by default at the moment in the open source driver.

I figured it was triggered by load, but I didn't know if there may have been something else that just wakes it up. But hey at least I know idle power isn't as low as it could be. Seeing as it's winter, I don't mind the extra heat for the time being but if it isn't fixed by the time summer comes then I'm going to look into temporarily underclocking. Currently, this GPU handles everything I throw at it at max detail, with the exception of a couple games.

Haha and "block clockgating" is a bit of a tongue twister.

[agd5f]

Does that concern laptops too ?

When using my Amd secondary gpu, it can get quite hot, but the fan (shared for cpu and gpu) won't spin. However it will spin If I use the Intel gpu intensively.

It depends on the OEM. Laptops usually only have a single system fan controlled by a microcontroller on the motherboard rather than a GPU specific fan that utilizes the controller on the GPU. The GPU fan controller is more commonly used on desktop boards.

[schmidtbag]

Does that concern laptops too ?

When using my Amd secondary gpu, it can get quite hot, but the fan (shared for cpu and gpu) won't spin. However it will spin If I use the Intel gpu intensively.

Much like what adg5f said, that fan probably isn't controlled via the GPU. The weird thing is if that GPU uses the same heatsink as the CPU, the fan should still spin up. But, I noticed sometimes fans spin up based on both temperature and CPU usage, as though the fan controller is predicting the system is about to get very hot. This may be the case with your laptop, because even though the temperatures are rising, the CPU may be relatively "relaxed", so the fan controller is may be expecting the system to just naturally cool off on its own. I could be wrong, just a guess.

There are applications out there that allow you control fan speeds. If you're lucky your controller will be compatible, and you should be able to control the fan based on sensor temperature.

[theghost]

Let's hope they hit 3.19.
Is there a particular reason why these patches are disabled by default ?

[agd5f]

Let's hope they hit 3.19.
Is there a particular reason why these patches are disabled by default ?

The smu fan control is not working reliably yet. Once it does, I'll enable it by default.

[plasmasnake]

The smu fan control is not working reliably yet. Once it does, I'll enable it by default.

In my opinion, the best part about the open source driver is being able to file bugs and get direct feedback from devs like you. I'm having a couple of major issues with Catalyst, so once the fan control issue is fixed with radeonsi I'll be switching over.

I have a bit of an unusual setup because my main monitor is 2560x1440, and I have a secondary monitor on the left in portrait mode (rotated to the right) at 1200x1920. Catalyst doesn't seem to like that. Tear-free desktop was causing major corruption until they fixed it in 14.6 beta, and I have some issues with video-accelerated programs like Chrome and some games flickering like crazy when I launch them. Switching my secondary monitor to landscape fixes the issue.

Catalyst also has a fan control bug, where my fan goes to full blast when I resume from suspend and stays that way until I reboot. I sent in a report for that, but no response. It seems it's impossible to get through to the Catalyst people.