11

I have a 2 yr old HP pavillion dv4 laptop. Ubuntu runs fine. But I recently noticed that the temperature of the cores (with just a browser open, not playing flash videos) is significantly higher than when I run windows 7.

If I buy one of the laptops listen in the 'ubuntu certified list', is it likely to run ubuntu at the same temperatures as windows 7?

5
  • The only way to get a truly accurate temperature reading is with an external device - temperature monitors are only assured for deltas.
    – Phoshi
    Mar 2, 2011 at 16:18
  • @Phoshi that is not true. They might be off by 0.5 degrees or so, but they are not wildly inaccurate.
    – psusi
    Mar 2, 2011 at 19:09
  • 1
    @psusi; I've seen wildly differing temperature claims intra-OS, never mind between two OS', I have a lot of trouble trusting it completely. If temperature is ever an issue I'd want to verify it properly, but often all you need to know is the delta and that should be accurate.
    – Phoshi
    Mar 2, 2011 at 19:21
  • 1
    @Phoshi that is because there are usually multiple sensors at different locations that actually have wildly different tempreature. For example, inside the cpu, and some location on the motherboard maybe near the northbridge. Right now my cpu is only 34 degrees but my radeon video card is 80. A difference between two readings does not mean either one is wrong.
    – psusi
    Mar 3, 2011 at 14:41
  • @psusi; Of course, to think such a thing would be insanity itself - I'm talking two seperate tools giving temperatures that have the same offsets to each other but different temperatures, that rise and fall by the same amount. I have no doubt that most of the time they are accurate, but by no means are they infallible.
    – Phoshi
    Mar 3, 2011 at 15:40

3 Answers 3

3

It's very difficult to make a direct comparison between one OS and another temperature wise as the programs that collect the data from the temperature sensors in your machine do that in different ways.

For instance two different programs in windows can give different results about the same computer at the same time.

I'm sure that the Canonical testing team would fail a system if it was damaged by running Ubuntu. However they don't know what will happen many month years in to the future.

Even Hardware manufacturers don't know what will happen even when they know what OS will be running on the hardware for example

0

To answer your question; no. To address your problem; make sure frequency scaling is working. Install the gnome-applets package, then right click your panel and add the frequency scaling applet. Keep an eye on that.

0

A test suite should put the system under significant load and if temperature (or other) related failures result under that scenario, then it might be grounds for the system to fail certification. Otherwise, if temp, even though a bit higher, is manageable by the system, all is probably well, as long as the system functions normally.

Maybe this just means that Linux is way hotter than Windows :P

You must log in to answer this question.