Changing ATI power profile to low

My laptop’s graphics card has never had the best support on linux and has now approached the point in its life where even ATI has stopped supporting it with new driver releases. On one hand I’m thankful that the open source driver performs well enough that I can continue to use this hardware, on the other though it does result in some downright awful power management. With the default settings my graphics card runs extremely hot and requires the fan to be on constantly. Luckily there is a quick way to fix this and tell the open source driver to run my card in a low power state at all times.

  1. Start a root terminal (or use sudo for everything)
  2. Set the card to use the power profile (assuming your computer uses card0)

    echo profile > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method

  3. Set the power profile to “low” setting

    echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile

You can check what the current setting is by running the following command:

cat /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile

I would also highly recommend rebooting and then checking the setting again. I found that on my laptop the setting was being reset everytime the computer turned on. If this happens to you try my work around – simply edit /etc/rc.local and add the line in step 3 before the return 0. My file looks like:

#!/bin/sh -e

echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile

exit 0



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