Comment by dismalaf
4 months ago
The laptop 3050 card is the worst piece of computer hardware I've ever owned. Literally just heats up the laptop and still delivers shit performance.
I've got an MSI laptop and I've settled on simply never using the Nvidia card (prime-select iGPU only). The integrated graphics have access to 16gb of ram (versus the Nvidia card's 4gb) and deliver better performance without the whole laptop hitting 100 degrees.
I have a Clevo-based laptop. Our experiences were similar. The nvidia dGPU offers terrible performance and doesn't do much besides heat up the laptop. I disabled mine via the firmware. The CPU reaches 90 degrees when given almost any sort of load. It quickly thermal throttles itself down to uselessness despite three loud fans. I often have to use systemd shells with CPU quotas to manage this.
I hope the Asahi Linux project succeeds so I can buy the fabled Apple silicon laptops just to run Linux on them.
Interestingly enough my clevo (from tuxedo) does not have a gpu switch in firmware...
Which model is yours? Mine is a PA70ES.
I just double checked the firmware setup and it seems I was misremembering things. There's a toggle between "DISCRETE" and "MSHybrid" which means dGPU only and hybrid iGPU + dGPU graphics. I use it in MSHybrid mode with nouveau drivers. This keeps the dGPU in the lowest possible power mode.
It still wastes around 7-15 W doing pretty much nothing according to my monitoring script. That's the entire power budget of a single board computer like the Latte Panda Mu.