Hello all,
I have a NVIDIA Geforce MX550, which is being limited to 1 watt of power. I have tried
sudo nvidia-smi -pl 30
and it is not working - power limit adjustment is not supported.
I have also tried going to the BIOS to modify Graphics settings - there is no option for power management - it is mainly CPU -related options
Here is the output of nvidia-smi -
Thu May 29 12:00:27 2025
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 535.230.02 Driver Version: 535.230.02 CUDA Version: 12.2 |
|-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M | Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap | Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|=========================================+======================+======================|
| 0 NVIDIA GeForce MX550 On | 00000000:01:00.0 Off | N/A |
| N/A 62C P8 3W / 1W | 5MiB / 2048MiB | 0% Default |
| | | N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: |
| GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory |
| ID ID Usage |
|=======================================================================================|
| 0 N/A N/A 7750 G /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg 4MiB |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
and sudo dmesg | grep -i nvidia
[ 0.000000] Command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-6.11.0-26-generic root=UUID=edee3132-c105-4794-8349-78e44a7df48e ro quiet splash apparmor=0 pcie_aspm=off nvidia-drm.modeset=1 vt.handoff=7
[ 0.026332] Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-6.11.0-26-generic root=UUID=edee3132-c105-4794-8349-78e44a7df48e ro quiet splash apparmor=0 pcie_aspm=off nvidia-drm.modeset=1 vt.handoff=7
[ 2.118599] nvidia: loading out-of-tree module taints kernel.
[ 2.118605] nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel.
[ 2.118607] nvidia: module verification failed: signature and/or required key missing - tainting kernel
[ 2.118608] nvidia: module license taints kernel.
[ 2.175081] nvidia-nvlink: Nvlink Core is being initialized, major device number 237
[ 2.225771] NVRM: loading NVIDIA UNIX x86_64 Kernel Module 535.230.02 Fri Dec 20 21:42:05 UTC 2024
[ 2.232985] nvidia-modeset: Loading NVIDIA Kernel Mode Setting Driver for UNIX platforms 535.230.02 Fri Dec 20 21:52:34 UTC 2024
[ 2.234567] [drm] [nvidia-drm] [GPU ID 0x00000100] Loading driver
[ 2.901148] [drm] Initialized nvidia-drm 0.0.0 for 0000:01:00.0 on minor 1
[ 4.373692] nvidia_uvm: module uses symbols nvUvmInterfaceDisableAccessCntr from proprietary module nvidia, inheriting taint.
[ 4.411430] nvidia-uvm: Loaded the UVM driver, major device number 234.
Please note that when I start the laptop, the GPU’s power limit is 30W, but when i run anything GPU-intensive (such as playing Dark Souls) the GPU power limit drops down to 18W and finally 1W, and only a COLD boot is able to get the power limit back up to 30W, and the cycle repeats.
I am running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on Dell Vostro 3520, 8GB RAM, 12th gen i5-1235U CPU and a 512GB NVMe SSD.
Please help, having a GPU limited to 1 watt of power is basically equivalent to no GPU at all.