Short version: Can someone please advise me of the effect of adding a dedicated
NVIDIA GeForce GT 630M card to an Ubuntu laptop in terms of power consumption and performance gains/losses when doing general productivity tasks and booting up. Also, how good are the closed source, open source, and Bumblebee drivers for these newer cards compared to support for the Intel HD4000?
Long version/Background, if any info here is helpful:
I'm thinking of ordering a laptop from PC Specialist (a UK company who actually sell machines without Windows pre-installed) with the following specifications:
Genesis IV: 15.6" AUO Matte 95% Gamut LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Intel® Core™i5 Dual Core Mobile Processor i5-3210M (2.50GHz) 3MB
4GB SAMSUNG 1600MHz SODIMM DDR3 MEMORY (1 x 4GB)
120GB INTEL® 520 SERIES SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 550MB/sR | 520MB/sW)
Intel 2 Channel High Definition Audio + MIC/Headphone Jack
GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® N135 802.11N (150Mbps) + BLUETOOTH
Now, as I want this laptop mainly for work and not for games, I would be more than content with the HD4000 integrated chip which comes with the processor. However, for compatibility reasons, I am not able to get the specs I want unless I choose a
NVIDIA GeForce GT 630M 1GB graphics card, which I don't have a great deal of use for.
I'm willing to buy it, however, as it's still cheaper than any other laptop with the specs I want. However, I know that Linux power management isn't fantastic with open-source graphics drivers, and I don't much about Bumblebee. Basically, whilst I'm happy to 'tolerate' the card being there, I don't want to experience any negative effects on the rest of my system (battery, performance etc) and if there are likely to be any, I might reconsider my purchase. So if anyone can advise me on the effects, I would be very grateful, since I doubt I can just turn the card off.
Thankyou for any assistance :)
