[warning]DISCLAIMER: GOING THROUGH ANY OF THE STEPS BELOW COULD DAMAGE YOUR HARDWARE, YOU ARE DOING SO AT YOUR OWN RISK[/warning] The Samsung NP530U3C works fairly well with Linux (at least on Ubuntu) providing that your kernel and firmware are recent enough (Ubuntu 12.04.3 or at least 12.10 are recommended). There is a few revisions of this laptop, the one I used to test this is the Ivy Bridge version. Your first question should be "Why would I change the GPU frequencies of my laptop?", to that I have two possible answers 1. Battery life 2. Heat dissipation This laptop seems to have a table of frequencies linked to the governor/CPU speed in use. First you can see the current min and max frequencies by running the following commands as root. cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/i915_min_freq and see the following result min freq: 350 cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/i915_max_freq again result with appears as max freq: 1050 To understand the extent of the possibilities there is a handy frequency table that you can access as follow cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/i915_ring_freq_table you will get something like this. GPU freq (MHz) Effective CPU freq (MHz) 350 800 400 800 450 800 500 800 550 800 600 800 650 800 700 800 750 1200 800 1300 850 1300 900 1400 950 1500 1000 1600 1050 1700 Now let's say that you are playing a game that hits your CPU fairly hard, you will see the temperature of the latop rocketting at above 80C, not very healthy. Now thank to this you can actually limit the frequency of the GPU to something a bit more manageable for the very limited cooling capabilities of an ultra-book. You just need to run a command like this to cap the GPU. echo 550 > /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/i915_max_freq And in my particular case, that reduced the operating temperature to 64C, a huge bonus! All of the changes are lost after a restart and you will to do that again after each reboot.
Nov 17
Playing with the GPU frequencies on a Samsung NP530-U3C
