How-to: Force nVidia Powermizer performance in Linux

Owen — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 23:42:45 +0000

You may wish to force the nVidia Powermizer performance level of your Linux laptop for whatever reason. I do it personally because the nVidia 8400GS in my system can run Compiz-Fusion “OK” at the lowest performance level; thus I get a great animated desktop and retain my battery life!

Edit: Jump to this comment for an alternative way to achieve this.

This is rather simple to achieve, as fortunately the Linux nVidia driver retains a mechanism to read Windows registry values. How do you pass Windows registry values to the nVidia Linux driver? I’m glad you asked! Just like this:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
BoardName "GeForce 8400M GS"
# force Powermizer to a certain level at all times
# PLEASE NOTE:
# ENSURE you change the ‘x’ if you copied and pasted to an actual letter ‘x’
# WordPress is doing some funky formatting to change it to a multiplication symbol
# level 0×1 = highest
# level 0×2 = med
# level 0×3 = lowest
Option "RegistryDwords" "PowerMizerLevel=0×3"
EndSection

That’s the relevant excerpt from my xorg.conf; it’s simply a matter of defining the “RegistryDword” option under the Device section, and passing in the appropriate arguments. In this case, we want to tell PowerMizerLevel to be a certain value.

You can copy and paste the above code, but you must be mindful of one thing: change the ‘x’ character above to an actual “x” – WordPress is doing some funky auto-formatting to change the character from a regular letter ‘x’ to a multiplication symbol as it lies between two numerals. After you’ve changed it, restart X, start up Compiz-Fusion or another 3D app, and keep a watch on the performance level in the nVidia utility. It doesn’t change!

SoundBlaster Live 5.1 ALSA 5.1 speaker configuration

Owen — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 04:57:18 +0000

I’ve finally figured out the cryptic alsamixer to configure ALSA properly for use with my SoundBlaster Live 5.1 and my 5.1 speaker setup. I think a recent update has made this work properly because I’ve intermittently played with alsamixer over the years I’ve been using Linux, and I’ve never been able to get it to work properly. Though, today I can finally announce that it does. The following configuration, when pasted into your /etc/asound.state file (remember to backup your existing one first!) will hopefully “just work” — no further configuration necessary. It’s advisable to use your physical volume knob to adjust the overall volume level as I would not recommend playing with the software volume levels.

File’s here: asound.conf

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How-to: Force nVidia Powermizer performance in Linux

SoundBlaster Live 5.1 ALSA 5.1 speaker configuration