SB700 high temperature problem

[ario]

Hi guys,
I have an ACER 5536 laptop with AMD Radeon HD3200 M780G chipset.
SB700 south bridge chip on the mainboard is too high in absence of AMD properietary driver. I searched all over AMD.com site and found the driver for GPU under linux. but there's no driver for the SB700 as part of the M780G chipset. Thus the South Bridge is too hot and as it's placed upon hard-drive, HDD temperature get's to high up to 62C. So I can not use linux on my laptop because of the high temperature. What should I do to solve the problem? Please help me.
Thanks in advance.
More details are mentioned:

Temperatures are as below:
In Ubuntu 10.10 when no AMD drivers installed: GPU: 70C CPU:60C, HDD: 62C
In Ubuntu 10.10 when AMD catalyst driver installed: GPU: 50C CPU:45C, HDD: 62C
In windows when no AMD drivers installed: GPU and CPU: seem to be warm, HDD: 50C
In windows when all AMD drivers installed: GPU and CPU: seem to be cool, HDD: 38C
Kernel of my Ubuntu 10.10 is updated to 2.6.32-28-generic. Also I installed the kernel PAE to support my 4GB ram.
My Ubuntu 10.10 is the 32bit version.
I tried both "ati-driver-installer-10-10-x86.x86_64.run" and "ati-driver-installer-11-2-x86.x86_64.run" drivers and no difference seen on south bridge and HDD temperatures.

[DanL]

You should try a newer kernel to see if open-source drivers have improved power management. 2.6.32 kernel is old (it came with Lucid/10.04). The GPU may be heating up your whole interior

[ario]

You should try a newer kernel to see if open-source drivers have improved power management. 2.6.32 kernel is old (it came with Lucid/10.04). The GPU may be heating up your whole interior

Thanks for the reply. As I mentioned, after installing the proprietary driver from amd.com site for linux, GPU and CPU temperatures reduced. But SB700 is still too hot. I saw some kernel patches for amd SB700 chipset series here for x86: Disable HPET MSI on ATI SB700/SB800, here for USB: fix SB700 usb subsystem hang bug, here for x86: hpet: workaround SB700 BIOS and here for PCI: Add MSI INTX_DISABLE quirks for ATI SB700/800 SATA and IXP SB400 USB. I don't know if they can solve my problem. Can they?
But if they can, how can I install a kernel patch? Where can I get information about compiling a kernel along side applying some patches in linux specially Ubuntu 10.04?
Thanks a lot

[ario]

You should try a newer kernel to see if open-source drivers have improved power management. 2.6.32 kernel is old (it came with Lucid/10.04). The GPU may be heating up your whole interior

It's not solvable by installing new kernels. Tried:
Ubuntu 10.04 with 2.5.32 kernel: No Change
Ubuntu 10.10 with 2.5.35 kernel: No Change
Ubuntu 11.04 with 2.5.38 kernel: No Change
Any Idea?

[chefkoch]

Couldn't it also be that your disk is just constantly spinning in linux? Ubuntu has a package called "laptop-mode" or something like that, which normally takes care of that.

Powertop might also allow you to enable power saving features (or at least give you clues). powertop -d will print a summery.

[ario]

This is my mistake didn't tell you the whole story of my last year working to solve this problem! I removed hard-drive completely, installed Ubuntu 10.10 on a SD Memory Card and brought up the system from memory card. I mean no hard-drive, SB700 is still hot. Now what?

[ario]

This is my mistake didn't tell you the whole story of my last year working to solve this problem!
Tried laptop mode tools: No Change
Tried powertop and followed all it's suggestions: No Change
Tried hdparm -B1 -S1 /dev/sda and saw hdd going to spin-down mode: No Change
Tried KDE 4.6 on Kubuntu 11.04 powered by upower and udisk: No Change
Tried 64bit and 32bit versions of kernel 2.6.38.5: No Change
Tried cleaning all heat sinks and refreshing all silicon pastes: No Change
Even tried removing hard-drive completely!!! Installed Ubuntu 10.10 on a SD Memory Card and brought up the system from memory card. I mean no hard-drive, SB700 is still hot.
Cool on windows with drivers installed and hot on any other situations.
I know there's some patches in make menuconfig. Don't know which patch and where will solve my problem, or if there's any patch to solve this problem.
I wonder is there any computer user with SB700 chipset and linux? Or I'm the only man on earth who uses this combination?
Ant idea?

[DanL]

I had a 780G/SB700 board as well as a 770/SB710 board. I did not have problems with either of them and there is no temp sensor on the south bridge, so I'm not really sure what you're worried about. The only thing I see from your post is that temps of all your components heat up when using the open-source video drivers.

[ario]

I had a 780G/SB700 board as well as a 770/SB710 board. I did not have problems with either of them and there is no temp sensor on the south bridge, so I'm not really sure what you're worried about. The only thing I see from your post is that temps of all your components heat up when using the open-source video drivers.

I'm worry about the temperature of SB700 chip. Although it has no temperature sensor on it, I can sense the temperature using a mercury temperature meter, but why measuring temperature? I can even smell the solders there after 30 minutes! It causes the temperature of HDD to go high. As you see in my first posts, GPU and CPU temperatures reduces when using proprietary graphic driver, but not the SB700.
Can I ask you what is the model number of your laptop/motherboard?
What is the name and version of your operating system?
Are you using AMD proprietary graphic driver? Which Version though?
Please answer these questions, because it helps me a lot. There a problem which I can solve in Windows but cant solve that on Linux, and it made my laptop useless for me

[chefkoch]

Well ..the heatsink of the SB710 on my Asrock A780GXH definitely gets uncomfortably hot when I touch it. I don't have a good way to measure the temperature though.

The datasheets for the SB mention things like clock gating and the ability to disable unused sata and usb ports. I don't know if these would amount to much or if they are handled by the bios, acpi.. whatever already.