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I have a question concerning Intel Turbo Boost and the ability to disable it in Ubuntu 12.04. I wanted to disable Turbo Boost because it produced a lot of heat and I didn't find a need for it in Ubuntu (being so lightweight as it is compared to Windows). I found that by installing msr-tools and running modprobe msr and then:

wrmsr -p(PROCESSOR) 0x1a0 0x4000850089

Where PROCESSOR is the number of my CPU core allowed me to shut off Turbo Boost for that core. After appending msr into my etc/modules and the wrmsr lines into my rc.local I found I was able to shut off Turbo Boost at boot.

My question is: Is this method I've used safely disabling Turbo Boost, or should I attempt to find a different workaround.

I have an MSI-GE60 with no setting in the BIOS for Turbo Boost, so changing it like this appeared to be the only way.

Thanks to anyone who can help.

AFriggenSquirrel
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4 Answers4

2

You could set the max CPU frequencies to a setting just under the turbo boost - attached is the code I use in rc.local

echo 1 > /sys/module/processor/parameters/ignore_ppc

for x in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu[0-3]/cpufreq/;do 
  echo 2501000 > $x/scaling_max_freq
done

In my system the speed of 250100 is a turbo speed, non-turbo being 2500000

Charles Green

Charles Green
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1

You can also disable boost by setting /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/boost to 0.

Jonas Malaco
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0

For example, to disable turbo over 69 degrees you can crontab every 1 minute:

echo $[`cat /sys/devices/platform/coretemp.0/hwmon/hwmon0/temp1_input`/69000] > /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo
Lozongo
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You most probably have to do it through the BIOS - at least, that is how it was for me. Otherwise, you could install indicator-cpufreq (sudo apt-get install indicator-cpufreq) and set it to a setting that doesn't use Turbo, like conservative. You can even set it to a constant speed (mine is usually at 1.2), and change it when you find things getting slow. I would also recommend Hardware Sensors Indicator:

 sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alexmurray/indicator-sensors
 sudo apt-get update
 sudo apt-get install indicator-sensors

To monitor your temperature and make sure it's not going to high.

notablytipsy
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