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#1 2006-06-22 16:12:55

stephelton
Member
Registered: 2006-06-22
Posts: 8

ati mobility drivers and battery life

I have an Asus M6Ne with an ATI Mobility something or other (9600 or so.) When I first got my laptop I ran WinXP on there but eventually decided to go with Linux because I fell in love with bash.

I've come a long way - got wireless working, got speedstep working, got e17 working... but I've still got some TODO's (including suspend to ram/disk, getting some of the buttons to function...)

To get to my point, my battery life is nowhere near what it used to be. I can cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0 and get some nice info about the battery, which reveals that it's design capacity is 4300 mAh and its current full charge is 2836 mAh. So that's got a lot to do with the battery life it has, obviously. While it is discharging, i can do "watch cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0" and i observe that it discharges (with wifi off, running at 600 mhz, and the screen dimmed quite a bit) at about 1200 - 1350 mA / h. Even at the battery's claimed capacity (4400 mAh) that doesn't measure up to the 4.5 hours I could run it back in its microsoft days.

I also observe that the fan usually runs. I presume this is controlled by hardware sensors. So that leads me to believe that the video card's power saving abilities are not being utilized. Are there any drivers, proprietary or otherwise, that support whatever the ATI mobility cards can do to ease power consumption? I don't need but minimal hardware acceleration - as long as I can run ZSNES and MPlayer I'm fine.

Also, should I be able to run my CPU any lower than 600? IIRC, I could run it as low as 200 MHz in XP.

Thanks much...
~stephen

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#2 2006-06-23 02:34:22

The_Nerd
Member
From: Syracuse, NY / Baltimore, MD
Registered: 2005-11-30
Posts: 134
Website

Re: ati mobility drivers and battery life

the latest ati fglrx drivers do support power states!

this will list the power states which you can choose from

aticonfig --lsp

you can then set the power state with

Option "PowerState" "<NUMERIC>"

in xorg.conf

theres also a way to use aticonfig to set it on the fly, just check the manpage for the proper arguments.

With everything on my laptop turned down to the lowest states.. i get about 30 minutes less in linux than i do in windows.. which is good enough for me! hopefully setting your video card to the lowest state helps you get a good deal closer.

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#3 2006-06-24 13:05:05

gothicknight
Member
From: Portugal
Registered: 2006-04-08
Posts: 219

Re: ati mobility drivers and battery life

There's no power states for ATI M10 (9600Pro)... but there's a way of setting those. I've developed a program to scale CPU, HD and ATI GPU. The ATI GPU scaling is unstable and can get the screen with some strange lines... but indeed it saves power consuption and reduces tempetarute.
  The code for my program's ATI scaling was retrieved by a program named rovclock http://www.hasw.net/linux/.
  My program is at http://sf.net/projects/lach.

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#4 2006-06-25 20:12:38

stephelton
Member
Registered: 2006-06-22
Posts: 8

Re: ati mobility drivers and battery life

The_Nerd wrote:
aticonfig --lsp

i get:

# aticonfig --lsp
Error: Unable to obtain POWERplay information.

I don't think I have my drivers set up correctly though and I lose patience messing with them ><

Thanks for the repsonse. I'll look in to getting my drivers working correctly =P

~stephen

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#5 2006-06-26 22:29:47

matsche
Member
From: .at
Registered: 2004-04-27
Posts: 120

Re: ati mobility drivers and battery life

new version is out!! i think this will be the solution to the topic!! MAYBE!!

https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/ … 26.18.html


THX!!
cu matsche

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#6 2006-07-01 03:40:02

stephelton
Member
Registered: 2006-06-22
Posts: 8

Re: ati mobility drivers and battery life

matsche wrote:

new version is out!! i think this will be the solution to the topic!! MAYBE!!

https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/ … 26.18.html

Catalyst? Linux? Whaaaaa?

Someone should throw this in AUR / community (... or stable, if they are stable...)

I much prefer letting package managers handle installation of packages, so as to save myself a headache later on...

Thanks dude.
~Stephen

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