GPU Powersaving on DELL Inspiron 5150, 5160, 8200, Latitude C840 and the M50

[Jesper]

Hi!

Being a silent member of this forum for some time, I decided to let you in on a little tweak, I havent seen described yet here. Forgive me, if I did miss it somehow.

I have a Dell Latitude C840 with a GeForce4 440 Go graphics card. I have always wondered why there were no Powermizer function available to save battery power and minimize heating of the system. I got rivatuner and tried to mess a little around to see what could be done about it. At a time, I stumbled over some addable keys, that sounded suspicially like what I was after. They were:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Video\{3492C553-B778-449B-9A58-3C87CCACA836}00]

"EnableCoreSlowdown"=hex:01,00,00,00

"EnableMClkSlowdown"=hex:01,00,00,00

"EnableNVClkSlowdown"=hex:01,00,00,00

After adding them and rebooted, I discovered in Rivatuner H/W monitor, that by default GPU core now runs at something like 35MHz instead of 220MHz! Running a 3D application it switches to 220MHz, and exiting it goes back to 35MHz again. Wow! At last some powersaving available for my oldie notebook. Instead of getting rivatuner and searching for those keys, I guess you could add the information above to your registry or simply run the attached .reg file. However, I'm uncertain that the key "{3492C553-B778-449B-9A58-3C87CCACA836}" is default at anything else than a Dell c840 with 32mb GeForce4 440 Go. So if you wanna try, please have a look in the registry first and see if it matches your videoadapter, and if not, edit it to match.

Please let me in if this was worth something or not. :)

Jesper

gpuslowdown.reg

Edited August 7, 2007 by ®®®
enhanced title

[Guest Bits]

Hello Jesper

I just want to comment that your fix is quite nice! I have rivatuner already when I saw your fix and tried your fix settings (the GUID in the registry was different for me) then restarted. When Windows came back up I checked the rivatuner Hardware monitor and voila, my core clock was down from 220 mhz to a wonderfully underclocked 27.56 mhz!!! so I fired up one of my 3d games and left the hardware monitor open and it spiked up to the 220 mhz (the max) like you said and when I quit it went back down to 27.56 mhz. :rofl:

At least my fan isn't running non-stop now lol :P And one immediate difference I notice, is that the side of the laptop with the graphics card is now MUCH COOLER than before. I don't have SpeedFan on this computer but I know it is cooler because I can actually put the laptop on my lap without it burning me. brilliant. :)

So kudos to jesper :P :) for finding this nice tip. Do you think finding a tip to lower the memory clock MHz will make the computer use less power and run even more cooler?

Also I can see this tip working for many other people than just us dell i8200/c840/m50's. Thanks again Jesper.

[LSudlow]

Jesper, thanks for posting those settings! I can confirm that they work well with the Go5200 too.

:)

[®®®]

Glad we have the RatingSystem back else this thread would have been overseen. It was only one 5star vote, but that did it :)

FAQed and 5star rated.

[Guest Hans]

I tried this registry add for my Dell 5160. For some reason it is not working. The clock rate won't drop via this reg hack. I use the power miser setting and it drops from 200 to 100 but I'd like to get to that 28ish clock rate to cool things further.

I tried adding the reg hack to the 0000 folder a few times to no avail.

Appreciate any input!

Hans

[Guest llllllll]

This doesn't actually fix video card performance it only fixes heat problems and fan. Just a Note This Doesnt Work all my games play at the same crap fps; the video card is the problem just buy a new computer if you have the budget.