Dolphin GameCube/Wii Emulation and the Devterm A06

I guarantee it is. It’s less than 20°C in the office right now, and mine throttles under sustained load on gear six - so if it’s 40°C where you are, you’re going to hit that limit that much sooner!

Easy way to find out is to run the following in a terminal next to your emulator (or output it to a file for later review if you’re running the emulator full-screen):

watch cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/cpuinfo_cur_freq

The first number it prints out is the temperature in millidegrees Celsius - so 36875 is about 37°C. The rest of the numbers are the clock speeds of each of the six cores in the DevTerm. If you’re not running in gear six, some will say “<unknown>” - those are the cores that are switched off.

When you load the emulator, you’ll see the clock speeds jump to their maximum - then the temperature will start to climb. Once it hits 80°C, it’ll throttle - and you can watch the clock speeds sink.

Here’s a thermal torture test I did - representing an absolutely worst-case scenario. I mean, real terrible stuff - you’ll never get it as hot as this as quickly as this under a real-world workload.

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You can see it starts throttling at around three seconds into the ten-minute workload(!)

This is, of course, why the DevTerm arrives configured to turn off the two big cores and lock the little cores at 1GHz:

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Much better - but, obviously, you’re sacrificing performance.

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