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Originally reported on Kubuntu mailing list, by Mitch Golden

I am posting this here because I don't know exactly where it should be
posted.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.

Perhaps the installer can be made to configure this stuff properly for
nvidia machines, or at least instructions can be added.

** Affects: xorg (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: Incomplete

-- 
Nvidia GPU installer misconfiguration Plasma 5
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1394856
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