Using IGP on desktop

[Skurge]

Is there anyway I can use the intel IGP on the desktop and have no load on my cards and then when I fire up a game, the discrete GPUs get used.

 

[24601]

Lucid Virtu MVP

 

[Madpacket]

IMHO Lucid Virtu sounds great in theory but in practice is a buggy mess. If you get it working correctly consider yourself lucky I never got it working 100%, expect random blue screens etc.

 

[Qwertilot]

More relevantly perhaps, why isn't this possible, or even routine? Really obvious incentives to do it and the technical obstacles hardly seem like they should be impossible.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

Yeah, it's nice in theory, but virtu just doesn't work right.

But gpu's are pretty good at power saving when they have nothing to do, even if virtu would work perfectly you'd only save 10W or something.

 

[Skurge]

Well, installed virtu and after leaving my pc on for a couple of hours, I came back to a blue screen.

Well with the fans turned down at idle my primary card would be at 57c. When I have YouTube open it goes over 60. This is in winter. I don't know if the temps are so high cause I'm using a 4k display or not.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

If you have a 4K screen and that Z97-Gaming 5 motherboard virtu is pointless anyway. The motherboard has no displayport, so you have to connect the 4K screen to the gpu, and that means the gpu can't turn off. If the gpu cant turn off you might even use slightly more power with virtu.

 

[Madpacket]

I agree this should be easy enough on desktops to implement but I guess it's not a priority. Laptops have been doing this mostly correctly for years now. New cards like the Geforce 750 series only use 5-7 watts while idling but they're not powerful enough for 4K (gaming anyway). Radeon 290's power down pretty good but can run into issues if trying to overclock with power savings enabled or if running multiple monitors.

Sadly there's not an elegant solution to this problem. Lucid Virtu was supposed to solve it....

 

[24601]

I agree this should be easy enough on desktops to implement but I guess it's not a priority. Laptops have been doing this mostly correctly for years now. New cards like the Geforce 750 series only use 5-7 watts while idling but they're not powerful enough for 4K (gaming anyway). Radeon 290's power down pretty good but can run into issues if trying to overclock with power savings enabled or if running multiple monitors.

Sadly there's not an elegant solution to this problem. Lucid Virtu was supposed to solve it....

Yes good luck making your own R9 290 bios signed with the AMD Golden Key as hash to properly set your voltages and clocks at every level.

The ones they shipped at are trash. The ones the driver overrides the bios to are trash.