Graphics: Software Rendering Overheats CPU, Causes Shutdown

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Linus MacWinfrey

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Hi

I have an old Acer eMachines E625 with AMD/ATi R690M Radeon Express 1200 graphics chip and an AMD Athlon TF-20 800 MHz CPU.

I am on Mint 17 Qiana Cinnamon 32x.

Due to software rendering, the CPU is very busy and my laptop shuts down frequently due to overheating. As I am hardly ever working online, I want to revert to a much older Linux version that still has driver support for this old hardware.

Which version should I revert to and can I still download it from Mint? or equivalent Ubunto that will still support my old rig?

I cannot get a Windows Vista Home Basic 32x DVD so I also cannot go back to Windows even though I have the licence key.
 
Clean the CPU fan. It's probably moving slower because of dust build up causing machine to overheat.
 
Open the laptop, clean out the dust, remove the old thermal paste on the cpu/gpu/heatsinks, replaces with fresh Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste, problem sorted.

As far as I know the catalyst 13 series drivers still support your gpu.

Might be a way to tweak the free drivers. maybe try manjaro.
 
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Rendering on an old laptop? They weren't designed to have high sustained loads.

You are doing the equivalent of what cars endure in the Eastern Cape. Get the right tools for the job. Throw that laptop away and get an entry level desktop that can use the parallel processing power of a graphics card. You remind me of people that mined bitcoin on their routers/laptops/phones/watches/tvs/cats...
 
Wasabee! said:
Rendering on an old laptop? They weren't designed to have high sustained loads.

You are doing the equivalent of what cars endure in the Eastern Cape. Get the right tools for the job. Throw that laptop away and get an entry level desktop that can use the parallel processing power of a graphics card. You remind me of people that mined bitcoin on their routers/laptops/phones/watches/tvs/cats...
Click to expand...

I think he's referring to the cpu rendering desktop related stuff due to a lack of gpu driver support. But then again I could be wrong which would not be a first...
 
Thanks for all the advice, folks.

I wish I could afford something better!

It usually happens when browsing the Internet, CPU loads are very high and temperature goes well above 90 degrees Celcius. Clem from Linux Mint told me a while ago that my gpu is not supported, which is why I was thinking of reverting to an older version.
 
Rather don't render, because on such an old laptop, it could cause problems.Laptops are designed to dissipate such heat under constant load.

If under normal browsing, clean the heatsink (you will need to open it up) and possibly replace the thermal paste, as often that is of a cheap kind or gets brittle and hard and does not do it's job anymore. Google is your friend.
 
Linus MacWinfrey said:
Hi

I have an old Acer eMachines E625 with AMD/ATi R690M Radeon Express 1200 graphics chip and an AMD Athlon TF-20 800 MHz CPU.

I am on Mint 17 Qiana Cinnamon 32x.

Due to software rendering, the CPU is very busy and my laptop shuts down frequently due to overheating. As I am hardly ever working online, I want to revert to a much older Linux version that still has driver support for this old hardware.

Which version should I revert to and can I still download it from Mint? or equivalent Ubunto that will still support my old rig?

I cannot get a Windows Vista Home Basic 32x DVD so I also cannot go back to Windows even though I have the licence key.
Click to expand...

And why is that?
 
ginggs said:
You can try Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) or Linux Mint 13 (Maya). Both are long term support releases, supported until April 2017.
http://releases.ubuntu.com/precise/
http://www.linuxmint.com/release.php?id=18

It seems like Ubuntu 12.04 has versions 2:8.960 and 2:13.35 of the AMD driver (fglrx) available.
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fglrx-installer
Click to expand...

If he's gonna download ubuntu 12.04 he needs to ensure it's either 12.04 or 12.04.1 as anything higher than that will have issues with catalyst 13.1
 
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