Low power DX11 MXM GPU?

[KingGheedora]

Looking at a P151HM1 (Clevo, from Malibal).

I just found out that this laptop doesn't support optimus, and apparently you can't take the video card out and just use the sandy bridge's onboard GPU to drive the display. That's a disappointment as I don't play games; I'm getting this for software dev and the usual assortment of Office and browsing apps.

I'm looking for ways to improve battery life, and one of my thoughts is to remove the GeForce GTX 560m 1.5GB graphics card and replace it with something that uses less power. Would this even be worth it? Or is the clock speed throttling that the video card's drivers do already enough? I read that this card uses u pto 75W of power, but I haven't found any stats for how much it uses while idle.

What's the lowest power MXM GPU I can put in here that would support DX11? I still want reasonable DX11 performance/support because most browsers and even Visual Studio 2010 and Windows Aero use 3d acceleration.

 

[dma0991]

The easiest method would be for you to use a 3rd party software like MSI Afterburner or similar and downclock your GPU to the lowest you could go. You could also use ThrottleStop to downclock your CPU if you think it is necessary. Doing the hardware method would be very tedious and time consuming.

 

[KingGheedora]

Thanks for the advice. I wouldn't mind replacing the GPU because from what I've read these Clevo based laptops are very easy to upgrade. You get access to the HD, GPU, CPU, and at least 2 of the 4 RAM slots simply by opening the bottom plate. Compare this to most laptops I've opened, where you have to open the bottom plate, unscrew all kinds of different things, remove hinges, and remove the keyboard just to get at anything other than 1 or 2 ram slots.

But, it looks like MXM GPU's aren't that easy to buy. I only found them on ebay so far and it's even harder yet to find power use figures so I may just stick with the solution you suggested. Most of the time I use my current laptop I'm still on AC power, even though the batter life is 5+ hours.

I may also buy an extra battery to use when I'm travelling, when it is harder to find AC outlets. So far it doesn't look like there are any higher capacity batteries for this Clevo P151HM1 system (comes with an 8-cell 77Wh one).

 

[dma0991]

It differs from one brand/model to another but having fixed a Dell XPS M1730 myself, I took apart the whole laptop just to get the GPU out, took hours. MXM slot GPUs are very rare and expensive which makes it counter intuitive for it to be replaceable in the first place. An extra battery pack would work great.