Fan noise on ati mobility radeon 9700

[killer]

Hello everybody. This is my first post in this forum.
I actually have a problem with my ATI Mobility radeon 9700 on my ASUS A4 laptop. I'm using ubuntu 9.04 with ATI open source drivers. 3D acceleration works good (at least I don't have any particular problem till now) but fan noise is very annoying. Maybe shoul I modify something in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file? And can you suggest to me some improvement to do in xorg file for my video card? I also attach my actual xorg.conf configuration. Thank you very much.

Section "Device"
	Identifier	"Configured Video Device"
	VendorName  	"ATI Technologies Inc"
	BusID       	"PCI:1:0:0"
	Option		"UseFBDev"		"true"
	Option    	"AccelMethod"  "EXA"
	Option    	"EXAVSync"     "on"
	Option 		"AGPMode" "8"
	Option 		"DynamicClocks" "on"
	Option 		"AGPFastWrite" "yes"
	Option 		"ColorTiling" "on"
	Option 		"EnablePageFlip" "true"
	Option 		"RenderAccel" "on"
#	Option 		"XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "true"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier	"Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier	"Default Screen"
	Monitor		"Configured Monitor"
	Device		"Configured Video Device"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
        Option          "DontZap"       "off"
EndSection

[Ren Höek]

The developers of the open source driver are improving power management:
X.Org ATI Driver Supports New Power Options

So for future releases there is hope for dynamic clocking.
For now, if "DynamicClocks" does not work for you, you can clock down your graphic card manually in situations the performance is not needed.

One possible tool for under (and over) clocking is rovclock (can be installed in Ubuntu through synaptic). Look in the man pages for proper usage.

If it has the effect you expect you can build a start script to clock down every time after boot...

But changing the clock of your card manually can also lead to broken hardware. Be aware, to go on your own risk and be careful.


By the way, what is the Option "UseFBDev" for?

Good luck
Ren

[killer]

Ok, thank you, I hope new driver will be released soon with the fix. Nevertheless I have to say that noise is not so much like it was in the past with previous version of the open driver, but it is still more of that I have using windows or ubuntu with proprietary driver.
For the "UseFBDev" option, I don't know exactly, I've found it on a forum ( http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33806358 , post #3), but it doesn't change anything for me, so I decided to comment it.
Thank you again for your collaboration, and if you have some other tip to tell me, you're welcome !! jk! sorry for my not perfect english!

[bridgman]

The new driver code is already out in source code form, although I'm not sure if there is a prebuilt package available for Ubunut yet. The Dynamic Clocks option has been renamed to Clock Gating, and a couple of new options have been added to force low power modes and to automatically downclock the GPU when DPMS switches off your screen.

[killer]

Thank you bridgman...can I compile the new driver for my distro? where can I find the tarball?

[bridgman]

Just go to the xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati project at cgit.freedesktop.org, click on the most recent change (the recent changes are listed at the bottom of the page) and the change summary should include links to downloadable source archives.

You might want to just use git to get the source instead...

[killer]

I've noticed that I've installed the 6.12.1 version, and the last one is the 6.12.2...maybe it'better to wait till it will be present ad update in my ubuntu distro...but I couldn't find a changelog for the different version...and, last question, maybe exists a list of whole options supported by the driver? thank you again.

[bridgman]

Yeah, the power management code went in after 6.12.2.

There is a man page in the source tree with options, I think.

[killer]

okay, thank you. So I'm waiting for a prebuilt package for my ubuntu!!