Acer Nitro 5 AN515-45 on linux. Power off the discrete gpu.

qex

Hello,

Turns out Acer Nitro 5 AN515-45(-R9UX) powers the nvidia gpu no matter what. I tried a lot of things to power down it completely. Without RTD3 and/or driver it constantly uses ~25W. Neither acpi_call nor bbswitch modules work. But even with RTD3 it still sits on ~7W. I even tried some weird workarounds like manually telling the driver to suspend through nvidia-sleep.sh.

I know there is no decent linux support, but maybe someone has found solution. Perhaps Acer could even release it as BIOS feature?

Thanks in advance!

Thread was edited to add model name to the title

batmalin

dGPU is always on. 5-7W when idle same like my fully AMD system (AN515-43). It is that by design you can`t turn it completely off.

qex

Well, I messed with acpi tables a little, and \_SB.PCI0.GPP0.PG00._OFF call seems to disable nvidia gpu. At least the nvidia driver cannot use the card and power usage kind of decreased. I think that's as far as I can get.

batmalin

There are some other options described here: https://github.com/Askannz/optimus-manager/wiki/A-guide--to-power-management-options