Public bug reported: I have installed 14.10 Plasma 5 on my laptop, which is a vintage 2011 System 76. Of greatest significance is that it has an nvidia 560M graphics card in it.
When I first installed 14.04, I noticed that the PowerMizer report of the NVIDIA X Server Settings would report that the graphics chip's clock was more or less constantly spun up to its highest clock rate. Heat and power use were very high, and I constantly heard the fan running. I found there were two ways to fix this: (1) Add a file called 05-nvidia.conf to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d containing the lines: Section "Device" Identifier "Device0" Driver "nvidia" VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation" Option "RegistryDwords" "PowerMizerEnable=0x1; PerfLevelSrc=0x2222; PowerMizerDefault=0x3; PowerMizerDefaultAC=0x3" EndSection This pegged the graphics card at its lowest possible clock rate, which was adequate for most things but sometimes led to bad playback on some videos. See: https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/410089-nvidia- powermizer-how-tweak (2) Revert to the 304 driver. This still spun up to high clock rates a bit more often than it seemed to need to, but was fairly reasonable otherwise. I expected that this would soon be rectified, since I saw that version 337.25 of the driver allegedly fixed some issue with performance in KDE: http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/76278/en-us Jump ahead to yesterday when I installed 14.10 plasma 5 - I noticed that even with the 304 driver the PowerMizer reported the clock at its highest rate. With nothing moving on the screen at all and my not touching the mouse, it was pegged. I found that even installing the xorg-edgers driver (340 I believe) had no effect. Furthermore, 340 did not respond to the xorg.conf settings file above. The only way I can get plasma 5 to run reasonably on this machine is to revert to 304 and *also* put the settings file in. This is of course not optimal. Is there some way to determine what exactly is happening that causes the graphics clock to spin up so high? Nothing much is happening. Just scrolling a window in firefox is sufficient to start it. ProblemType: Bug DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.10 Package: xorg 1:7.7+7ubuntu2 ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.16.0-25.33-generic 3.16.7 Uname: Linux 3.16.0-25-generic x86_64 NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia ApportVersion: 2.14.7-0ubuntu8 Architecture: amd64 CurrentDesktop: KDE Date: Fri Nov 28 00:00:27 2014 SourcePackage: xorg UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install) ** Affects: xorg (Ubuntu) Importance: Undecided Status: New ** Tags: amd64 apport-bug utopic -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu-X, which is subscribed to xorg in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1397178 Title: kubuntu 14.10 plasma 5 spins up PowerMizer To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/1397178/+subscriptions _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat Post to : ubuntu-x-swat@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
