What's the practical use of nVidia NVS 5400M?

A T530 with a nVidia NVS 5400M configured. I heard that it was not much a performance boost over the Intel graphic card.

Shall I disable it to save battery life or somehow configure it to boost the system performance? I mostly use word-processing and browsing on this laptop.

 

In your usage scenarios, the NVIDIA is never activated -- the system uses the integrated HD 4000 by default.

 

For your needs, there really isn't a point to the 5400M. Perhaps you could disable Optimus and keep the T530 on Intel graphics only to save maybe a minute or two of battery.

 

For some reason, by default, Optimus makes Firefox use the Nvidia Card, so i would just set the mode to Intel Only, i think you would maybe get up to 20 extra minutes or so.

NVS is pretty bad at gaming, it is a low-end workstation card for rendering and whatnot.

 

Hmm, didn't know that. The things you learn .

 

I wish that someone could invent this:

When youre on battery, the laptop automatically goes into Power-Saver mode with Intel Card only.

When youre on AC, the laptop automatically goes into High Performance mode with Nvidia Card Only.

If someone could do that i would be so happy

 

I think you can do that in the Optimus settings already. Though personally, I'd like to bring back the hardware switch that the first-gen Optimus laptops had.

 

If anyone can show me ill give a rep point.

 

Don't really care for the rep, though once I get back to my apartment I'll check out my W520's Optimus to see if such settings are there. I recall that they were, though I haven't checked in awhile and didn't pay much attention to it.

 

Googled and found a program called Aeroplan that basically does the windows power settings switching

 

Is there a way to completely disable the NV card? I set the Intel card as the default in the BIOS and I wonder if that is enough.

 

Nvidia Settings -> Manage 3D Settings -> Preferred Graphics Processor -> Integrated Graphics