sony-vaio-z-series team mailing list archive

[Carlchristian Eckert <Carli-Eckert@xxxxxx>]

Hi all!
While trying to maximize the battery life of my VGN-Z21VN (running
Karmic with Raphael's janitor-script), I stumbled upon the "PowerMizer"
section of the nvidia-settings tool. (NVidia driver is version 185.XX).
I noticed, that the performance level always remained at "Maximum
Performance", which surely often uses a lot more power than actually
needed. After a quick search I found out, that adding the line

Option        "RegistryDwords"    "PerfLevelSrc=0x3333"

to the xorg.conf (seen and explained at [1]) and restarting X, sets the
NVidia-card to a dynamic mode.

So if anyone of you sometimes uses its VAIO on SPEED-Mode while running
on battery, this might be worth a try to decrease power consumtion of
the GPU (worked for me!).

@ Raphael: I didn't test one of the newer NVidia drivers yet, but it
might be worth a thought to add something into the janitor-script to set
the performance of the NVidia-card to dynamic mode.

Best regards,
Carlchristian




Sources:
[1]
http://owened.net/2008/04/23/how-to-force-nvidia-powermizer-performance-in-linux

and

http://owened.net/2008/04/23/how-to-force-nvidia-powermizer-performance-in-linux/comment-page-1#comment-15712