# Disable  nVidia card or put in lowest possible power mode

## theBlackDragon

A bit of background, when I replace my desktop I usually use that old box as my home server. As a result I don't need it to have keyboard/mouse or screen, and as a result of that, I don't need a graphics card in the box either.

Unfortunately all the information I found on the net suggests an MSI K9N Platinum motherboard won't boot without a graphics card, no problem, I figure I've got this fanless nVidia card lying about, I'll just put that in and since I won't be using it it'll be smart enough to shut down and stay cool. Alas, it is not that smart and get horribly hot (hotter than it became during normal operation before...)

As such I would like to tell the kernel to either disable the card or put it in some sort of very low power mode, preferably the former. I have not loaded any drivers for this card.

After some googling I found that I could "unbind" the card, like so:

```
# echo -n "0000:06:00.0" > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/forcedeth/unbind

-su: echo: write error: No such device
```

This doesn't quite seem to work.

Does anyone happen to have any suggestions on what to try next, or pointers on where to look?

I'm using a 2.6.39 kernel fwiw.

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## chithanh

You may be able to control the power state with the nouveau driver and /sys/class/drm/card0/device/performance_level* controls (this requires CONFIG_DRM_NOUVEAU enabled in your kernel). For details see http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/PowerManagement

If that does not work, you can install the proprietary Nvidia driver and start X. Even if it is otherwise useless, it will activate power management for the card.

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## Jaglover

Not sure, but maybe KMS has some possibilities.

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## theBlackDragon

 *chithanh wrote:*   

> You may be able to control the power state with the nouveau driver and /sys/class/drm/card0/device/performance_level* controls (this requires CONFIG_DRM_NOUVEAU enabled in your kernel). For details see http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/PowerManagement

 

That looks promising, unfortunately it requires a 3.x kernel and kernel.org's been down for a while now   :Sad:  I guess it will have to wait until after my holidays.

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