Low power mode for GPU
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Hello everybody,
It is now over 6 months i am happily using pfSense for my small home network. Everything is working as expected, but I'm trying to reduce power consumption the most I can with the hardware I already have.
Using powerd option helped really to reduce consumption for CPU, and I am currently wondering what I could do to reduce GPU consumption. I have a HD6450 GPU and I am looking for a solution to force the card to use its low power mode (from the power measurments I did, I am almost sure it does not).By searching on internet I didn't find any software solution (such as powerd for CPU), so I tried :
- To remove my graphic card -> machine will not boot, even with "Halt on no error" option in bios (A8NE motherboard),
- To mod the bios with Radeon Bios Editor -> no change as it seems that for HD6450 altering bios values does not work, the only solution seems to use ati ccc panel in Windows (!) to change frequencies / voltages. Of course while in Windows graphic card is adapting frequencies / voltages on its own with ati catalyst driver installed.
As I don't have any other idea right now, "I'm back" to software solution and requiring your help for this, any idea is welcome !
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Hint: Get a PCI GPU.
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My old board I'm using has an option I've never wanted or needed before anywhere except on pfsense. It has an internal VGA graphics adapter and at BIOS it can be set to off. The effect is nice. It will boot and run but there is no video at all of any kind. The only way to change that is to clear the CMOS with a jumper. I considered using this because I felt if the case is locked, and there is no console access going to be damn hard for someone to reset my password even with keyboard access because I've also turned off all boot options except that one drive in BIOS.
Anyway, guess that also saves power - But its otherwise a crap board. I'm surprised its working so well, but it does.
No idea if you can do this with your board.