Ubuntu 14.04 and AMD Radeon HD 7670M overheat problem

Question

I had earlier been running on Ubuntu 13.04 with the AMD Radeon HD 7670M graphics driver with the driver installed as given in What is the correct way to install proprietary ATI Catalyst Video Drivers (fglrx) directly from AMD?.

Recently i installed Ubuntu 14.04. The AMD support website "http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop?os=Linux%20x86_64#amd-catalyst-packages" shows 2 drivers - their beta driver and the catalyst 14.4 and both show my Radeon HD 7600M series as being supported in the release notes. But when i tried installing either , i am getting an error that my graphics card is not supported.

I even tried the driver i was earlier running on in ubuntu 13.04, but that too is now giving the same error.

Finally i installed a proprietary driver found under Additional Hardware and selected the Intel graphics card under switchable graphics in the catalyst centre. My current laptop temperature is around 61 C and even slightest computations are taking the temp to as high as 72 C .

I donot care about performance - all i care is somehow to reduce my laptop temperature - anyhow - even i tried switching the AMD card off using vgaswitcheroo , but i found that since kernel 3.12 there is dynamic power management and no way to switch the card completely off.

The output of my

lspci | grep VGA

is as follows now

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Thames [Radeon HD 7500M/7600M Series] (rev ff)

I donot want to switch back to 13.04 as 14.04 is much better. Also in windows [yes , my laptop is dual booted with windows 8] , the core temp is around 54 .

Please suggest if there is a workaround to somehow control the heating.

Update: I recently got my laptop cleaned by a professional. By cleaning , i mean he took out the fan and manually cleaned it by opening it .. and to my utter surprise the whole fan was almost blocked with dust .. after the cleaning , now the temperature of my laptop is very stable and around 50 C .. i guess the overheating due to radeon drivers was not the root cause ...

Answer 1

Sorry for the late answer , but I was finally able to install the beta version catalyst 14.6 .. I followed the procedure given here : https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/AMD#Latest_upstream_beta_and_stable_driver_downloaded_directly_from_AMD.27s_website .. i did get some hiccups about dependency problems and DKMS modules ..but i manually took care of them .. now my laptop's temp. is somewhere around 60-65 .. but thats okay .. Thanks for the help!

UPDATE : few months have passed since i installed the latest beta version catalyst 14.6 .. and the temperature is perfectly normal .. around 55-60 C.

Answer 2

As mentioned in the Update the problem was a dirty fan and cleaning it brought the PC back to normal temperatures. Posting this until the user answers his own question and the answer will be valuable to other users.

Personally, I vaccuum clean my fan and air intakes once per month as I had the same problem in the past burning out an NVidia card (luckily under warranty)