Ubuntu vs Vista Battery life/graphics card load on dell m1330

Hello,

So far, both Ubuntu and Xubuntu 9.04 have been very pleasant experiences on my desktop. I'm seriously considering loading one onto my m1330. I've run ubuntu off a live drive on my m1330 and all the important (for me) hardware - touchpad, wireless connection, screen, even media buttons - works perfectly.

However, in this limited experience, I'm worried that Ubuntu is running my nvidia8400 harder than vista was. There's obviously a worry here about battery life -I'm very happy with the 5+hours I'm getting on vista on an 18th month old battery - but I'm even more worried about stressing the notoriously problematic nvidia8400 card.

My evidence for the extra stressing is that, before I copper modded my m1330, a little bit of playing around on ubuntu - with nothing fancy going on - would send the fans into permanently high speed very quickly - and even cause the occasional shutdown. This wouldn't happen with just normal use in vista.

Of course, it's not quite a fair comparison, because (I assume) running ubuntu off the live cd causes heat to be generated from the dvd-player spinning around. It's also not the final word since I wasn't using the prop. nvidia device driver, which may make a difference.

Since the copper mod, my experience with ubuntu cd live have been stable, though the fan does seem to kick on early and stay on. But with the m1330, the less I stress the graphics card the longer it will live (I hope). Any advice as to whether this is all in my head, whether battery life will be affected, whether there are straightforward ways of keeping the card cool - even if this means slowing it down - when it's not running 3-d apps, would be very helpful and much appreciated.

Thanks,

 

Have you enabled PowerMizer? It should make a big difference when you are idling by clocking down the GPU. The instructions can be found here:
http://www.linlap.com/wiki/asus+g50v#nvidia_powermizer

You can run nvidia-settings to monitor the clocks and temperature.

Good luck

 

thanks ALLurGroceries,
that looks very promising. I'm going to take the plunge and put ubuntu on my laptop - I have a window in 2 weeks time - and see how it goes.

yossell

 

Yeah it should hopefully do the trick -- works well for keeping my temps down. Here's the device section from my /etc/X11/xorg.conf for reference:

Code:

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "nVidia Corporation GeForce 9700M GTS"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    Option         "AddARGBVisuals" "True"
    Option         "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
    Option         "NoLogo" "True"
    Option         "RenderAccel" "True"
    Option         "Overlay" "True"
    Option         "DamageEvents" "True"
    Option         "DisableGLXRootClipping" "True"
    Option         "TripleBuffer" "True"
    Option         "PixmapCacheSize" "1000000"
    Option         "AllowSHMPixmaps" "0"
    Option         "RegistryDwords" "PowerMizerEnable=0x1; PerfLevelSrc=0x3333;"
    BusID          "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

 

Is there a comparable utility for mobile ati cards in Linux? I supposed that any battery life discrepancies in Linux (compared to Windows, Vista or XP or even 7) would be due to most hardware being more applicable to Windows? But, maybe there are programs out there in Linux that deal with power management/battery life? At least, it may be easier to deal with mobile gpu effects on battery life but I rarely hear of any ati utilities in Linux. Is there any and if so, do any work?

 

Simply download the proprietary ATi drivers and you will get the full benefits including PowerPlay.