W520 and Ubuntu - Heat and Power issues

I recently received my new W520, and went ahead and installed Ubuntu 11.10

I was surprised at how easy it was, since the last time I did this was on an Asus netbook and it required a bit of fiddling to get everything working (mouse, brightness, wifi, sleep recovery etc..) All of this works perfectly out of the box on the W520 with 11.10.

However, I have noticed significant heat production with the 11.10 kernel, and massive power drains. I've tried with both integrated and discrete graphics selected in the BIOS, as well as the restricted or proprietary nvidia graphics drivers offered through Ubuntu's "Additional Drivers" option.

From what research I've done, I think that it is a problem with the Kernel's interaction with the Sandy Bridge chips.

Specs are:
i7-2720QM
Quadro 2000
Ubuntu 11.10


Now, the install itself is stable, it has never heated up to a point where I was forced to shutdown, even during 30 minutes of heavy load building some programming related stuff. I just do not like the idea that it is running a lot hotter (I'm sorry I don't know the exact temps) and the batter life is literally cut in half... 6 hours in windows 7, 2.5-3 hours under Ubuntu (with either graphics option).

Does anyone have experience with this issue, and can offer some work-around or fix?

Thanks guys!

(11.10 looks wonderful BTW, if you like Unity)

 

You can try setting pcie_aspm=force on the grub boot command line. That's PCIe power management, if it's off, your system will run much hotter. In a lot of laptops it's improperly reported by the BIOS so in the kernel it has been changed from on by default to off.

There are some others you can try, described here: [Phoronix] Tweaks To Extend The Battery Life Of Intel Linux Notebooks

Install powertop and run it on battery to get a reading of how many watts you are using.

 

..and to see whether power management for all internal devices/interfaces is active and to find out if there are any programs or drivers preventing the CPUs from going into low power states.