My computer has a strong GPU, which generally is a good thing. But it also means it comes with two big fans that, while the GPU works hard, can get somewhat noisy.
While playing not-too-fancy 3D games I've noticed that I get very high frame rates, even with all the nice details switched on - e.g. 300+ fps. And at the same time I can hear the fans working hard, getting more than 300 watts of waste head dissipated.
Since I'm not a hummingbird and thus consider 60 fps plenty smooth, I would find a lower frame rate acceptable in exchange for a quieter computer. Is there a way to achieve that?
2 Answers
Turns out there is:
Essentially:
sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib g++-multilib libx11-dev mesa-common-dev
git clone
cd libstrangle
make && sudo make install... gives you a new command named strangle, which you can wrap around / put in front of the game's executable when launching it. The author, Björn Spindel, also described how to use strangle with Steam games, and it works perfectly for me. It probably even saves a bunch of energy, if you play the game a lot ;)
I found an even simpler, but rather different way:
sudo nvidia-smi -i 0 -pl 200This limits the GPU to 200 watts (instead of the 350 watts it usually allows itself to consume). And with it, the noise gets much less, because less heat is generated.
But while the "strangle" approach only applies to one certain program, this wattage limiter applies to everything (until the next reboot, or running sudo nvidia-smi -i 0 -pl 350). So depending on what you want, one or the other approach might be more useful.
