Some time after fglrx 8.27.0 power consumption of fglrx increased. A patched radeontool is able to reduce it back to the old value by turning off unused clocks. Find the radeontool here: http://www.g2inf.one.pl/~anszom/MBP-ATI/ In my experience, after running 'radeontool power low', power consumption of fglrx is on par with vesa. Martin On Sunday 04 November 2007, Stefan Monnier wrote:
I've been fiddling with the power save features of the chip, in an effort to make my laptop a bit less of a space heater. Unfortunately I've been unable to get any results... :/
I've been using the included patch, which turns on any remaining power save feature on my board. Either I'm missing something or those features are doing a lot less than advertised (no measurable effect at all).
Have you compared the power consumption with vesa and fglrx drivers? My experience (with a X1300 mobile) is that the fglrx driver consumes a lot more power than the vesa driver, even if I use aticonfig. Also the radeonhd driver currently seems to consume the same power as the vesa driver (contrary to what I first thought).
So I suspect that the power-save feature only affects the card's GPU used for acceleration, but not the part that just pushes the framebuffer data out to the video display.
Stefan
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