My Librem 14 got "lazy"

Hardware
1

My librem 14 is thermally throtlled and yet fans practivally never go up to full speed.
They stay around 2400-2600 rpm (as reported by librem_ec_acpi-acpi-0 and /proc/cpuinfo reports each core to be running at 1400-1600 MHz.

In this state, the laptop can’t keep with my demands and feel sluggish.
Only when I put some ridiculous load, like 50 instances of bzip2 -1 </dev/urandom >/dev/null and 50 instances of glxgears, the CPU temperature rises to 71-74°C and only then fans go full speed. After removing this load, the laptop acts as expected: Fans contiune on full speed, cpu cores get clocked in the range of 1900-3500 MHz and everyting feels in order. But after about 15-30 minutes, CPU cools down below about 64°C, fans go back to 2400rpm and laptop enters “lazy” state.

I inspected the fans and radiators and removed what little dust and cat hair was there. That did not make any difference.

I am running EC firmware 1.13/RC1 (installed via Librem_14_EC_Update.iso taken from https://source.puri.sm/firmware/releases.git commit e765a78)
I tried few different versions: 1.12 (5104e2f), 1.11 (1fd05ac) and 1.7 (95e148a) – no difference.

To sum it up: My problem is that CPU gets thermally throttled and yet fans do not go at full speed.

Anyone knows how can I make fans do their job?

2 Likes
2

Thanks to Apple, which could be the reason why the Librem 14 is ridiculously made of Aluminum and Gnome, this means that the Librem 14 also has a passive and active heatsink, so the passive will activate first and then the active. I dont think the CPU is slowed down by temperature, but it could be slowed down by voltage to the CPU, my advice would be to give it full voltage via Librem-Control.

2 Likes
3

What operating system are you using?

2 Likes
4

PureOS Byzantium

1 Like
5

@jonathon.hall

6

Sliding everything to to max in librem-control seems to do the trick. Thanks for the tip. Cheers!

2 Likes