On Sun, Jun 16, 2024 at 12:55 AM Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Besides, for the wattage > the CPU uses, the cooler I have is waaaaaay overkill. I think my cooler > is rated well above 200 watts. The CPU is around 100 watts, 105 I think > or maybe 95.
So, I am just picking someplace a little random to reply to all of this. Normal temps vary by CPU model and you need to look up what is expected. All modern CPUs will throttle to maintain below a certain temp, and so if you have thermal issues you'll just get lower performance. A cooler might dissipate a certain amount of power, but that is going to be at a particular temp. Obviously a radiator that is at ambient temperature will dissipate no heat at all. The external temp of the CPU has nothing to do with the internal temp of the CPU, and a modern CPU can generate MUCH more heat than it can internally transfer to the surface of the die, and so internally it will heat up even if you use liquid cooling. As far as governors go, I'm not sure what is even recommended with Linux with modern CPUs. Most modern CPUs and their firmware manage heat/power based on performance limits. AMD calls this Performance-based Overclocking, but it is basically how they work even up to factory clock rates. Assuming you meet the cooling/power requirements the CPU can sustain a particular frequency on all its cores at once, and a higher frequency on only one core if the rest are idle, and then it has a maximum frequency that a small number of cores can temporarily exceed but internal temperature will rise when this happens until throttling kicks in (I think this is at least in part firmware modeled and not exclusively based on sensor data). This is all by design in a desktop CPU, and allows a CPU to have significantly better burst performance than sustained performance, which is a good approach as desktop loads tend to be bursty. I imagine server processors (like enterprise SSDs) are optimized more around sustained performance as they tend to be operated more at load. I suspect that the most recent CPU generations will work best if the hardware is allowed to manage frequency, with the OS at most being used to communicate whether a core is idle or not. -- Rich
