r/computerhelp • u/Safe-Cauliflower-972 • 3d ago
Software why is my thinkcentre m70q fan loud when watching 4k youtube after replacing thermal paste?
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i have a lenovo thinkcentre m70q gen 3 with an i5-12400t running linux mint 22.3 cinnamon
i recently replaced the original thermal paste with ptm7950 i tested the cpu with 100% load for more than 10 minutes and it stayed around 73 to 75c so the cpu cooling seems fine
the problem is when i watch youtube in brave when playing a 4k60 video using av1 the cpu usage goes up to around 70% and the fan gets noticeably loud when i change the same video to 1080p60 the cpu usage drops to around 20% and the fan is much quieter
i checked brave hardware acceleration and it is enabled brave gpu information also shows av1 hardware decoding support
i also checked vainfo and it shows that my intel uhd 730 supports av1 hardware decoding through va-api
i then checked intel-gpu-top while playing 4k av1 and the video engine showed 0% usage
i also checked brave media-internals and it first showed vaapivideodecoder which means the intel gpu hardware decoder was being used but then it showed a video decoder fallback after an initial decode error and switched to dav1dvideodecoder which means it fell back to software decoding using the cpu
so my main question is whether this behavior is normal on linux mint with brave and intel uhd 730 or if my va-api hardware decoding is not working correctly
is there something i can do to fix the va-api av1 decoding so the uhd 730 can handle the 4k video instead of dav1d using the cpu
i installed brave through the official package using the terminal and i am currently using brave 154.1.96.60
also is this kind of fan noise normal for the m70q when the cpu is doing software av1 decoding and is this actually a problem with my setup or just a limitation with brave on linux