Arch Linux

eenzaameendje

Member

Registered: 2024-03-04

Posts: 19

Improving laptop Asus Zenbook UX6404 battery life

Hi everyone,

I have been using this laptop for about a year and while I love it, I cannot stand its poor battery life. To mitigate this issue and improve battery life, I have tried several things:

1) Installed and configured TLP, to set devices such as bluetooth in sleep mode when it is on battery. Same for Ethernet or Wifi and so on.
2) Installed auto-cpufreq, to set the cpu in power saving mode dynamically.

However, to my surprise, none of these tools gave me such a huge battery life gain than when I accidentally stopped loading NVIDIA drivers and was using the integrated graphics card from Intel. When this happened, I could get up to 6hs of battery life, which for a laptop with Linux is a lot. But when I solved the issue and started to load and use NVIDIA drivers again, my battery life when from 6h to 2.5h.

Is there any way in Arch Linux to always use the Intel integrated graphics card and switch to NVIDIA graphics only when it is really needed?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,230

Re: Improving laptop Asus Zenbook UX6404 battery life

The graphics card should automatically suspend via the logistics in https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PRIME#NVIDIA -- but in that last nvidia-smi you posted in the other thread it looks like misconfiguration of xorg, as in the proper PRIME case you'd only see a very small 4MB Xorg process on nvidia-smi without using nvidia-prime.

Do you have a custom xorg.config generated with nvidia-settings or so? Can you post your xorg log/your GDM journal if you're running that

sudo journalctl -b -u gdm