Comment 161 for bug 22336

These problems have been affecting my desktop, making it difficult to play games, compile programs, and transcode video.

Enabling cpufrequtils (essentially by modprobing p4_clockmod) was done per this guide: http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Feisty#How_to_enable_your_CPU.27s_Power_Saving.2FFrequency_Scaling_features

This works fine, but the "current policy" for cpufrequtils is set between 400 MHz and 1.28 GHz, despite it listing 3.2 GHz (my processor speed) as an avilable frequency. It is not possible to change /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq either using sudo or sudo -i. Using sudo it fails and says "permission denied". If I sudo -i and then echo 3200000 to it, it fails silently, accepting the echo but not changing the value when read by cat.

Since I want to use above 1.2 GHz speed, this is not a workable solution either. Others have encountered this problem in setting max scaling frequency in Ubuntu before, see http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-364548.html and http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=308163

My CPU stays around 80 to 90 degrees under use, and while doing processor heavy applications goes to 93 and slowly creeps to 100, where the system shuts down. Yikes!