Dell Inspiron with NVIDIA GPU overheating while gaming on Ubuntu 18.04

I recently got a Dell Inspiron with a dedicated GeForce MX150.

I'm using nvidia-driver-440 and everything works fine, except that while playing Underlords with best looking settings, CPU and GPU temperatures start to go over 95C and eventually the laptop dies (probably triggering a security measure for high temperatures).

This is the first time I'm using this laptop, so I'm not sure if this happens in another distros or Windows.

I installed tlp but haven't seen any differences.

Any suggestions?

1 Answer

I have the same GeForce MX150 in my Dell Ubuntu Series laptop and faced the same issue. I was able to fix the gaming problem by adopting the following configurations (number 1 is mandatory, the others probably are optional):

Configuration 1: in the PowerMizer section from the NVIDIA X Server Settings, there is a dropdown menu with its Preferred Mode options. Please set it to "Prefer Maximum Performance"

Configuration 2: still at the NVIDIA X Server Settings, you can also set the "Image Settings" dropdown in the OpenGL Settings section to "High Performance"

Configuration 3: since that you mentioned that you have tlp installed, you can open a terminal window and type

sudo tlp true

it switches tlp to the battery mode, which (I guess) reduces the power consuption by lowering the clockdown and consequently reducing the overheating.

As I mentioned, probably only configuration 1 is mandatory. Configurations 2 and 3 alone helped me with some games, but didnt solved the issue for all of them, so I'm using the 3 together. But you can check if only configuration 1 is enough for your needs.