NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M

With the ThinkPad T61 and the NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M, PowerMizer had worked as expected using the 169.12 proprietary driver. The mobile Quadro NVS solutions supports PowerMizer 7.0 for adaptively reducing the power consumption and heat output by changing the voltage and clock frequencies based upon the graphics load.

While this mobile GPU will work with the xf86-video-nv driver, which is open-source, that driver only supports 2D acceleration and is quite problematic. You also can't find features like PowerMizer within this driver. The open-source 2D/3D support in the Nouveau driver is still evolving.

The Quadro NVS 140M had idled at about 57~59°C within the Lenovo ThinkPad T61, which is a bit warm but still safe. NVIDIA's Quadro NVS 140M is based upon the G86M core, which is quite similar to the mobile GeForce 8400M (a bit slower than a GeForce 8500GT) graphics processor for consumer notebooks. At its full speed, the NVS 140M has a core frequency of 400Hz and memory frequency of 600MHz. Because of the TurboCache technology found on this GPU, the reported video memory capacity within nvidia-settings was 512MB.

Due to the Quadro NVS 140M GPU in the ThinkPad T61 not being easily swappable, we had just ran SPECViewPerf, Doom 3, Quake 4, and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars benchmarks with varying settings. All of the major SPECViewPerf tests were executed and in the three id Software games they were run at multiple resolutions.