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Reducing T420s Power Consumption under KDE/Linux

If you own a Lenovo ThinkPad T420s (or any recent-generation notebook with a Sandy Bridge CPU) with Intel HD 3000 Graphics, this information may help you to reduce the power consumption under KDE/Linux:

  • Intel HD 3000 Power-Saving: Enable the following Kernel command-line options: i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 i915.i915_enable_fbc=1 i915.lvds_downclock=1
  • Force ASPM: Enable the pcie_aspm=force Kernel command-line option
  • In KDE, go to “System Settings” | “Desktop Effects” | “Advanced” and set the “Scale method” to “Crisp”.

Overall, this brings my T420s’s power consumption down below 9 W. For best results, use a recent Linux 3.1-rc pre-release.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 6th, 2011 at 21:03 and is filed under KDE, Linux, OSS, Tech, Ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Reducing T420s Power Consumption under KDE/Linux”

  1. Alireza P. says:
    November 28, 2011 at 11:23

    Will this also work for my T420s running Ubuntu 11.10 which is unity and not KDE

  2. Thilo-Alexander Ginkel says:
    November 28, 2011 at 11:27

    The scaling method change obviously will not work whereas the other optimizations should work on plain Ubuntu just fine.

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