[mythtv-users] Improving Power Consumption on ASUS M3N78 Pro NVIDIA 8300 Chipset

Erik Hovland erik at hovland.org
Mon Aug 3 17:26:59 UTC 2009


> Now my media centre PC is also running Fedora 10 and trunk version of
> MythTv. I followed the same recommendations that I did on my server above
> but the power consumption is a little high at idle for my liking. I do
> enable suspend to disk, so that the machine is only running when recording
> or playing back.
>
> Media Centre Specs:
> ASUS M3N78 Pro onboard NVIDIA 8300 chipset
> AMD 5200 CPU
> 2Gb DDR2 (800MHz)
> 1x 250Gb WD SATA HDD
> 1x 100MB Ethernet
>
> Server Power Consumption: 90-100w Idle.
>
> Now I did a little bit of research into this and assume that it is the
> video processor that is using the majority of current? I also noticed that
> the NVIDIA drivers have something called PowerMizer that should reduce the
> clock speed of the GFX core when it is less loaded/idle? However this only
> seems to function for mobile GPUs? Is there anyway of enabling its
> function on my chipset or any software which provides similar
> functionality? I would greatly like to reduce the power consumption of the
> box especially when it is only recording and not displaying any video.

Relevant to this discussion is the Linux Symposium. There was a summit on
power w/in the kernel. here is the LWN link to the notes taken at that meeting:
http://lwn.net/Articles/345007/

See how NVIDIA gets dinged for being behind the curve on power
management when the notes turn to graphics drivers.

Not surprised since NVIDIA has been kickin' tail regarding video
acceleration.

E

-- 
Erik Hovland
erik at hovland.org
http://hovland.org/


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