Is Stealth Mode Killing Our AW's?

I've been wondering about this for a while now, isn't Stealth Mode killing your GPU & CPU lifespan?

Think about it when you overclock or downclock the GPU & CPU yourself its shortening the lifespan of both the GPU & CPU & with myself & I assume many others using Stealth Mode all the time isn't it slowing killing our AW's.

Not unless somebody knows something I don't I guess we won't know for another year or two when everybody's GPU & CPU start to die.

Just a thought for all I know I could be wrong & AW might have figured out a solution but its just I've never heard anybody else talk about this subject before.

 

What is the theory behind this thought ?
I believe most of the modern GPU/CPU have this feature to run under different power profiles. I may be wrong but that's what I heard.

 

Well that's the point of me asking since I'm no expert on this subject

 

Here is the proof to my theory
http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_8800m_tech_specs.html

And about Intel Processors
http://www.intel.com/cd/channel/reseller/asmo-na/eng/203838.htm

 

waaiiitttt... since when did underclocking affect the lifespan of any chip?

In any case, if i'm not mistaken, stealth mode actually turns off your main GPU and activates a secondary integrated one.

 

No stealth mode does not do that... you are confused between stealth mode and BinaryGFX. They are seperate. To use another card, you need to reboot that cannot be switched over dynamically. Stealth mode just uses the PowerMizer technology of nVidia cards and lower the voltage supplied to GPU and CPU

 

Ah... my bad. In any case, "stealth mode" is a perfectly normal feature. findvikas is right. I would think that it would in fact help the GPU survive longer

 

downclocking won't decrease the lifespan of your CPU/GPU.

 

I was kinda disappointed when I found out you cant switch between cards dynamically. I mean You can pop your hard drive and disk drive out on the fly. . . Oh well its understandable and with the great boot-up time on the m15x its not so bad.

 

When you mean switching between cards dynamically, did you mean switching which graphics card you want to use before you start up? If you meant that, you may find this thread interesting.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=311427

 

nah he meant running Solitare on Integrated and then switching to crysis on nvidia without reboot but thats not a case with windows. may be linux can do it. Windows load these drivers at run time to provide best performance possible

 

Oh! Then in that case, yeah.

'Tis a shame indeed.

 

hehe good man Oceanus

 

8)

It was a thread dedicated to that kind of finding, so I just had to post a link to it!

 

true. and with the proper registry edit, Media Center won't start up anymore either

 

I saw something
Why dont you share it with everyone Whizzo

 

I want to do the honor of sharing it with everyone!

Since starting the BinaryGFX from the touch pad causes Windows to also open the Windows Media Center, findvikas here has found out a way to prevent that from happening!

 

Hey dont blame me if that does not work, seriously blame it on OSDManager.exe
I later discovered that OSDManager is replacing that registry again-n-again with same value. So next reboot and you are back to basics.

Let me restate everything and it will work. We just made it work, right Whizzo?

Here is how
1) Fire up regedit.exe
2) Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MobilePC\HotStartButtons\0
3) Change the Application Path to your own application path, must be in double quotes eg. "c:\folder\file.exe"
4) Now select the folder "0", Right-Click and go to Permissions
5) Click advanced
6) Uncheck the "Include inherited permissions from this object's parent"
7) Click remove, if prompted.
8) Hit Ok, say Yes to prompt
9) Hit Ok, close regedit.exe

This will restrict the OSDManager.exe to change the value & make this value permanent and unless you change it manually next time.

To change it next time, you need to add permissions back

Here is how
1) Fire up regedit.exe
2) Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MobilePC\HotStartButtons\0
3) Now select the folder "0", Right-Click and go to Permissions
4) Click advanced
5) Check the "Include inherited permissions from this object's parent"
6) Hit Ok
7) Hit Ok, close regedit.exe

 

Ohh. I learn something new each day. I need to bookmark this for later reference.

 

yup, findvikas just walked me through the process, and it works. you just have to restrict the permissions a bit so OSD can't re-write the registry entry.

 

No system will be able to do it. Not until the ACPI bios allows for enabling and disabling of full graphics cards... though, technically, you wouldn't really need to disable the internal ever... just divert the output.

IN THEORY if the integrated graphics card would initialize when the nvidia graphics chipset is in use, you could restart Xserver (the GUI handler) after a quick swap of the .conf (configuration) files, so that it would load with the integrated, rather than nVidia, then using ACPI put the nVidia card to sleep, or a low-power state.

unfortunately, I believe the bios is programmed in such a way as to only let one video card be enabled at a time... causes a panic in the Xserver when it tries to startup (after you've switched cards).

this is all without mentioning the fundamental problem, that I believe that we should try to overcome before anyone would even attempt to dynamically switch between graphics cards... Switching between them via restart. the Fn+ F7 (i think it's F7) combination does not switch from integrated to external (or vice-versa) under linux. this is not a bios function, but a hotkey to a program function in the OSDManager. We'd need to find out what the OSD manager is telling the hardware, because it's likely we could simply write a shell script to copy some data onto a device, restart, and it would work... heck, the shell script could be triggered by a keypress... namely Fn + F7 (or whatever).

unfortunately, noone has dissected the OSD Manager enough to be able to say what command is sent to what device to switch the graphics cards, just before the restart...

if we could figure that much out, the shell script would be easy... it could even exchange the conf files for the different GFX cards, so that X doesn't panic... aaah, a man can dream.

 

You wanna know that... oh well I can tell you that. OSD install couple of WMI providers to talk to ACPI. and the classes name are WMI_SetVGAMode and WMI_GetVGAMode. OSD Communicate with ACPI using those wmi providers.

I had my script do the talking to WMI to control the BinaryGFX from vbscript

Code:

If IsInternal Then
	If Msgbox("Running on Internal, want to switch to External", 4,"BinaryGFX") = 6 Then
		SwapMode()
		Msgbox "Settings saved, you need to reboot to use External card",,"BinaryGFX"
	End If
Else
	If Msgbox("Running on External, want to switch to Internal", 4,"BinaryGFX") = 6 Then
		SwapMode()
		Msgbox "Settings saved, you need to reboot to use Internal card",,"BinaryGFX"
	End If
End If

Function IsInternal()
For Each objItem In GetObject("winmgmts:\\.\root\WMI").ExecQuery("SELECT * FROM WMI_GetVGAMode",,48) 
	If Not isNull(objItem) Then
		If objItem.VGAInfo(0) = 0 Then
			IsInternal = True
		End If
	End If
Next
End Function

Sub SwapMode()
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\.\root\WMI") 
Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery("SELECT * FROM WMI_SetVGAMode",,48) 
For Each objItem in colItems 
	'do nothing, just loop through it
Next
End Sub

Here is it again... now if only you want to decode what exactly driver do behind the scenes