How to disable discrete GPU using NVIDIA drivers?
- by penzoiders
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?
notes:
In BIOS I have no option to disable discrete GPU
This I think is not applicable because of the suspension-freeze issue
(with noveau): https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HybridGraphics
I've found this but I don't know which --sli option I should choose
to fit my needs:
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/hardy/man1/nvidia-xconfig.1.html
My system has not optimus or cuda, but anyone can tell me if
bumblebee can work for me?