I stumbled upon this in the syslog today.

Temperature above threshold, Running in Modulated Clock Speed.

What is causing this? Is this normal?

I have tried to search about this in the forums, but people appear to be more concerned with how to turn off the warning messages. I don't want to turn off the warning messages, I want to know how to adjust the threshold from a generic setting to one specific to my processor and motherboard so that the clock speed remains normal.

Am I correct in assuming that the kernel is non processor specific when setting these temp thresholds? Or does the Kernel detect the processor and set it according to intel specs?

In addition, I did some poking around.

What I did.

1. Simultaniously ran 6 instances of AntiVir, OO Write, Evolution, GL-117
2. Opened Syslog Monitor
3. Opened KDE SYstem Guard.

The intent was to put as much strain as possible on my system. What happened:

1. Lots of messages about CPU Temperature and Modulated Clock Speed. There was no drop in clock speed according to KDE System Guard though.

2. Only 2MB of swap space was used.

3. Everything responded slowly.

The issues I think I have are:
1. Incorrect reporting of CPU Temp
2. Swap space not being used efficiently. I know I have 1gb of ram, but with that much running I would think more would be dumped onto the HD.