[gentoo-user] OT: Southbridge chip on laptop overheating

[Daniel Frey]

Hi all,

Not really Gentoo-related (well except the overheating part - lots of
compiling ;-) )

I have a very old laptop. It is an LG F1 laptop (circa 2005/2006 I
believe) about nine years old. This has a Core2 1.6GHz chip and 4GB RAM,
even though it only sees 3GB (that should tell you it's pretty old!)

Anyway, I noticed during my last compile-fest on my laptop (reinstalled,
switched to systemd for testing) that a corner of the laptop is getting
really hot. We are talking a fair bit of heat here, you can't keep it on
your lap when it warms up.

So I took it apart yesterday, figuring I should re-do the thermal paste.
During this process, I discovered it's the southbridge ICH chip that's
overheating. There's no cooler at all on this chip (the northbridge and
CPU have heat piping), it's a bare chip.

Now, I suspect there's not much I can do about this given it being a
laptop and I might have to resign myself to the fact that I'm going to
have to buy a laptop later this year/early next year.

I am curious though, what causes this chip to overheat, and can I do
something about it?

I'm using lm_sensors, which doesn't provide a temperature for this
particular chip. I've monitored processes and nothing really stands out.
I've even tried disabling plasma, no luck.

Dan