How to disable discrete GPU using NVIDIA drivers?

Posted by penzoiders on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by penzoiders
Published on 2012-08-06T14:46:03Z Indexed on 2012/11/30 5:28 UTC
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I have a DELL studio XPS 13 (aka 1340) as of 12.04 most things run smoothly out of the box, but I have some power draining and warmness issues (if not to be called terrible heat issues)

The system came with a NVIDIA GeForce 9500M (which has Hybrid SLI) and it shows up in "lspci" as these 2 cards

02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G98 [GeForce 9200M GS] (rev a1)
03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation C79 [GeForce 9400M G] (rev b1)

I had to install nvidia-current over noveau driver 'cause noveau does freeze the system after suspension. By installing nvidia-current and running nvidia-xconfig the resume process after suspension is fixed.

By the way both with nvidia-current and noveau the system drains a lot of battery and heats up a lot. I suppose this is because the discrete GPU is always on. I don't really need 3D graphics on this system, if not the minimal to run unity and compiz for window management.

So my question is: How do I disable, using nvidia-current, the discrete GPU 9200M and use only the integrated one 9400M?

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