Thermal monitor

[psusi]

The word monitor means to look at, so when you ask for a thermal monitor, you are only asking for something that reads the temperature. The process you describe to try and limit the temperature is called throttling. It is the last ditch effort to prevent overheating, and is supposed to be done automatically by the bios. If the system is properly designed, it should not even be needed since when the fan is running at full speed, it should not overheat under full load. You should make sure that your fan is working, and not clogged with dust. Aside from that, use the frequency scaling applet to limit the processor speed, which is better than throttling.

[cloyd]

THis was the solution for fan control problems on my Gateway netbook. Don't know that it will work for you, but it may be worth a try. Some temp and fan control issues are machine specific.

Use acerhdf.

So that the acerhdf module runs at boot time

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/acerhdf.conf and insert the following

options acerhdf interval=5 fanon=58000 fanoff=53000 kernelmode=1

I the file doesn't already exist, this will create it. This assumes that acerhdf is on your system. I do believe I had to install it on mine.

If your machine supports acerhdf, this turns the fan on at 58 C and off when it gets down to 53. The interval between them is 5 degrees. Don't know why it is 58000 instead of 58, but that is how it works. You may want to try other values, but I have heard that best results are obtained when the interval between values is 5.

Don't know that it will work, but it improved how my machine runs.

[alextulu]

I searched about how Intel thermal monitor is activated and I found that i need to modify a model-specific register (MSR) called IA32_MISC_ENABLE. Can someone tell me how to use a MSR editor ?