Comment 52 for bug 370173

  I did some testing under that other closed source operating system and I have decided that in my case at least I believe the thermal behavior is pretty much the same. I think my issue under ubuntu is that the nvidia driver does not seem to be throttling the GPU (despite it being set to, and me not being in a 3d app). Under windows the GPU does get throttled correctly but when I am running 3D applications for an extended period (games etc) the system runs just as hot as it does under Ubuntu. Windows does not kick up the fan speed... it sits at ~3000rpm and gets extremely hot (GPU at 99C, CPU at ~90). Frankly... it seems the T61p just does not have enough cooling to keep things under 100C.

   I'm going to fool with the nvidia driver settings to see if I can get the power management to work properly. The current behavior is that it boots at a lower speed (cooler), but once it kicks it up to the high performance mode it never goes back. I suspect probably an nvidia problem... not kernel or ubuntu.

  Note this is on the Lenovo T61p specifically... some of the other thermal issues discussed above on other machines could be (and probably are) for different reasons.

James