Temperature reading on dashboard not believable
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Hi beautiful people:
My home pfSense box is showing an incoherent temperature reading in the dashboard.
Temperature always reads 27.8C, which is barely 7C over above ambient. More over, is fixed. It always displays 27.8 regardless of processor load, ambient temperature, placement of the box, chassis open or closed…
CPU is i3-2120T on an Intel DQ77KB board cooled by the stock cooler inside an Antec ISK 300 case with the PSU removed (this board take external brick). Both CPU and case fans spin @ +-900rpm, which is not much cooling even for such a low TDP CPU.
I would expect idle temperatures in the 40-45C region and load temperatures in the mid to high 50s.
I don't know which probe pfSense is getting the reading from, but the fact that is fixed on that value is odd. I can't think on any component running that cool inside the case either. Anything "active" should have a delta of 10C at least, and show some oscillation.
Is just a minor glitch, but being able to monitor temperatures is a useful feature. Any thoughts?
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What do you get with this command? Anything that matches up with the dashboard?
sysctl -a | grep -Ei "[0-9]+.[0-9]+C"
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What do you get with this command? Anything that matches up with the dashboard?
sysctl -a | grep -Ei "[0-9]+.[0-9]+C"
This is the output from the command… it does match the value on the dashboard but I'm sure is not the CPU temp (and I doubt is the RAM, MB or HDD temps).
$ sysctl -a | grep -Ei "[0-9]+\.[0-9]+C" hw.acpi.thermal.tz0.temperature: 27.8C hw.acpi.thermal.tz0._CRT: 86.0C hw.acpi.thermal.tz0._ACx: 80.0C 55.0C 0.0C 0.0C 0.0C -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 hw.acpi.thermal.tz1.temperature: 29.8C hw.acpi.thermal.tz1._PSV: 86.0C hw.acpi.thermal.tz1._CRT: 86.0C -
Have the same problem.
My output:hw.acpi.thermal.tz0.temperature: 21.8C hw.acpi.thermal.tz0._PSV: 50.0C hw.acpi.thermal.tz0._CRT: 60.0C hw.acpi.thermal.tz0._ACx: 50.0C -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -
That's the temperature reported by your BIOS… If it's not accurate, blame the BIOS. :-)
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That's the temperature reported by your BIOS… If it's not accurate, blame the BIOS. :-)
I've just checked that… BIOS reports between 43.3C and 45.6C in idle (I've just quickly run coretemp from WinPE).
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The values from coretemp are not the same values as those from ACPI. If you have the coretemp module loaded (see other threads here on the forum for that) it may get more accurate readings.
The sysctl output you posted showed it getting the values from ACPI, which would be from the BIOS. Coretemp gets the values a different way.
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The values from coretemp are not the same values as those from ACPI. If you have the coretemp module loaded (see other threads here on the forum for that) it may get more accurate readings.
I didn't know that there was a version of coretemp compiled for FreeBSD, thanks for the info, I will search the forum as suggested.
The sysctl output you posted showed it getting the values from ACPI, which would be from the BIOS. Coretemp gets the values a different way.
I was suspecting that… I presume that this means the BIOS is not giving the correct output via ACPI or it's giving it in a way that pfSense can't understand therefore is defaulting to that fixed 27.8C value?
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Yep, flaky BIOS is flaky.
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Yep, flaky BIOS is flaky.
Strange world… Incredibly complex BIOS code that allows extraordinary things like AMT yet is not able to supply something as basic as CPU/MB temperature readings via ACPI coherently on an standardised manner.
Either way, coretemp (which if I would have been a bit more diligent I would have found out that is part of pfSense since last July or so) gives a more accurate reading. Thanks again for your help.
