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I recently bought a “gaming laptop”, therefore it boards an Nvidia GPU and an Intel “GPU”. I have managed to install Ubuntu 16.04, but I have some problems with the way Ubuntu is using the GPUs. I found that there's two ways to make those GPUs coexist : whether I can use Nvidia Prime to select which GPU I want to use for the current session, or I can use Bumblebee to use the Nvidia GPU on specific programs.

First, I tried the prime option, as it seems to be the recommended solution on my favorite Ubuntu forum, but the thing is that even if I select the Intel GPU on Nvidia control panel, it is not “completely” disabled, and keeps using power, resulting in overheating and poor battery life.

As for bumblebee, I just gave up after two afternoons trying to make it work.

First, I want to highlight that I already have a windows partition for gaming and thus I absolutely don't need to use the Nvidia GPU on Ubuntu, which I use for daily computing and for work.

So as long as I use a laptop and I want it to have the maximum battery life, I'm trying to find a way to disable the Nvidia GPU to extend battery life.

Is there a way to do that on Ubuntu or any other distro ? (I have no problem changing distro if it solves my issue.) By the way, disabling Nvidia GPU in bios is something I can't do since I'll have to flash a custom bios in order to be able to do it.

Thanks for your help !

KarlOswld
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  • How do you know that Nvidia consumed power, when you disableid it in Prime? – Pilot6 Jul 23 '16 at 09:28
  • Twothings, I notice that the remaining "battery time" in Windows is 2 time longer that the one on ubuntu, and I feel (with my hands) that the side where my nvidia GPU is located, is getting hot ; and it's something that never happens in windows (unless I play games through the Nvidia GPU). – KarlOswld Jul 23 '16 at 09:39
  • There may be other reasons for that. You can use powertop to find out. Default power management in Ubuntu is worse than in Windows, but there are goot tools to improve it even better. – Pilot6 Jul 23 '16 at 09:40
  • I'll check that, but note that I also used the lspci command and it shows that both Intel and Nvidia GPUs are [VGA controller], which - I think - means that they're both used at the same time – KarlOswld Jul 23 '16 at 09:54
  • lspci shows both adapters no matter if they are used or not. – Pilot6 Jul 23 '16 at 09:59
  • As recommended, I used powertop to check out the power use, and it appears that the problem is not the gpu but my processor, since it never goes below the PC3 state, despite having up to a PC10 state. I made some searches, and it seems to be a kernel related issue for the skylake processors, so I upgraded to kernel 4.6 and even to 4.7 but I still have the issue... Any thoughts about it ? – KarlOswld Jul 29 '16 at 09:20
  • Were you able to reduce heat/battery issues? I'm on the same boat, windows runs cool and gives twice as much battery life. – Deepak Mittal Oct 11 '16 at 08:02
  • Any updates guys? Even I have the same problem? 5 minutes after installing ubuntu on a gtx 1060 laptop, overheating started. – posixKing Jan 21 '17 at 22:24

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