Sunday, October 19, 2008

GPU fan runs endlessly after upgrade to Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex

After upgrading to Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex with a Dell Latitude D630 (nVidia Quadro NVS 135M GPU) and using the nVidia driver 177, my GPU fan started to run for two seconds, pause for one, repeat that a few times, and finally run on full speed endlessly. Others had similar problems, e.g. with a Dell XPS M1330 with GeForce 8400M GS, as can be read in this bug report.

One workaround is to switch back to the nVidia 173 driver (which however is not marked as recommended). Another option is to upgrade to the newest Dell BIOS (in my case A13, but A12 also appears to work).

2 comments:

Michael S. said...

On my M1330, I was not Linux-savvy enough to update the Dell BIOS to A12 or A13 from within Ubuntu. So I rebooted into Vista (first time I've done that since I installed it two months ago), downloaded the Dell BIOS flashing utility, and let Dell do the work for me. Then I rebooted into Intrepid Ibex, and all is copascetic.

÷0 said...

Thanks for the solutions - both of them worked independently for me (also on an M1330).

I have seen warnings about BIOS A13 - it's not officially released yet and apparently causes fan problems. The Dell site points to A12 which works very well.