Comment by matheusmoreira
4 months ago
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.