Carl’s Blog

I was ripping/encoding some DVDs with Handbrake/GTK, when the CPU temperature monitoring applet started complaining that it couldn’t read the temperature of core 1. I looked at the array of temperature readings on the top panel, and all four cores were between 97 – 100˚C. That’s not good.

dmesg showed

kernel: CPU0: Temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 270544)

(which explains why things started to get real slow while Handbrake was still ripping/encoding)

I didn’t believe it and suspected lm-sensors or whatever monitors the sensors was going screwy, so I took off the computer’s side panel and touched the side of the CPU heatsink. I discovered the computer was telling the truth (it was very hot!).

I had an idea where I wanted to look first…

This is the Intel supplied heatsink. I always buy retail boxed CPUs for the 3x warranty and fans that are built to last. For a short while, some time around the Athlon XP 3000+, AMD were supplying a heatsink with very fine fins which had a tendancy to block up like this. Toshiba laptops are famous for it too.

If you leave your computer running 24/7, and you don’t have some means of monitoring CPU temperature and fan speeds, I suggest you find something. I used to use something called MBM5 on Windows. Gnome has sensors-applet (see screenshot) below.

Screenshot showing sensors-applet running on the top gnome panel.