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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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