Surface Pro 1 Overheating with 16.04

Question

I bought a Surface Pro 1 on Ebay. I am using it for ROS but I am going overseas and needed something to do so I installed Civ V. I know that the surface can handle the game on the lowest setting since my roommate played it on his surface pro 1 for about 6 hours. when I first ran the game, the surface quickly got hot in about ten minutes. I checked the CPU usage and it was near 95%. My initial thoughts was that it had something to do with windows hardware not running windows OS. It is not dual booted since the surface came with a Chinese version of Windows 8 (there was no way to change the language settings). It only has Ubuntu 16.04.

The next day, I watched about 20 min. of a movie before it started to get uncomfortably hot. To get the temperature i used:

sensors

I ran Civ V in the background again after setting ti the use "Processor microcode firmware for intel CPUs from intel-microcode (proprietary)" under the additional drivers setting.

Some specs:

Surface Pro 1 i5 3317u

4 GB RAM

128GB SSD

Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS

I've been looking around for solutions to the heating issue. I have not found much. the little I did was tried above. I'm wanting to know if it is a hardware and/or software issue so that I can return it if need be.

Answer 1

The intel-microcode package version 3.20151106.1 and later have the latest revision of the microcode for the Surface 1 (Intel Ivybridge-U, CPUID 0x306A9). If you installed that package and rebooted, your problem should not be the microcode. Ensure /proc/cpuinfo reports a microcode of 0x1c or higher.

For optimal thermal management on that box, you also need the embedded GPU to run with very aggressive thermal management (i.e. not at performance mode).

Please try to install "powerd" (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/powerd), it might help. Also, look for ways to configure the GPU to run at a lower power point, e.g. by downclocking it.