[mythtv-users] Improving Power Consumption on ASUS M3N78 Pro NVIDIA 8300 Chipset

[ken]

David Knight wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
>    I recently reinstalled my main server with Fedora 10 and KVM, this runs
> a virtual Windows XP machine, virtual Openfiler server and virtual
> Endian Firewall. I followed various guides I found by trawling the
> internet on how to minimize power consumption under Linux (including
> www.lesswatts.org).
>
> Server Specs:
> Dell PowerEdge T105
> AMD 4850e CPU
> 1.5Gb DDR2 (667MHz)
> 1 x Samsung 750Gb F1 SATA HDD
> 1 x WD 80Gb Blue SATA HDD
> 2 X 100MB Ethernet Cards
>
> Server Power Consumption: 60w Idle.
>
> Now my media centre PC is also running Fedora 10 and trunk version of
> MythTv. I followed the same recommendations that I did on my server above
> but the power consumption is a little high at idle for my liking. I do
> enable suspend to disk, so that the machine is only running when recording
> or playing back.
>
> Media Centre Specs:
> ASUS M3N78 Pro onboard NVIDIA 8300 chipset
> AMD 5200 CPU
> 2Gb DDR2 (800MHz)
> 1x 250Gb WD SATA HDD
> 1x 100MB Ethernet
>
> Server Power Consumption: 90-100w Idle.
>
> Now I did a little bit of research into this and assume that it is the
> video processor that is using the majority of current? I also noticed that
> the NVIDIA drivers have something called PowerMizer that should reduce the
> clock speed of the GFX core when it is less loaded/idle? However this only
> seems to function for mobile GPUs? Is there anyway of enabling its
> function on my chipset or any software which provides similar
> functionality? I would greatly like to reduce the power consumption of the
> box especially when it is only recording and not displaying any video.
>
> Looking forward to some pointers :)
>
> Regards
>
> Dave K.
>
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>   

As a reference I am running:

ASUS M3N-H/HDMI with NVIDIA 8300 onboard chipset
AMD 7750 CPU
2 x 250GB Hdd
1 x 500GB Hdd
2 x 1gb 1066MHz/PC2-8500 memory

Running Ubuntu 9.04
My power consumption is around 78w when idle which I also believe to be 
a bit on the high side.
I am able however able to run VDPAU with CPU scaling at 1.40Ghz, 
probably due to the higher (1066MHz) memory bandwidth.
I too would like to be able to get powermizer working with this GPU as 
my machine is running 24/7.

Ken