NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280M

CoolBits on Linux can be enabled for this notebook GPU, however, when attempting to adjust the core or memory clocks they will just default back to 583MHz and 800MHz, respectively.

With the GeForce GTX 280M supporting NVIDIA PureVideo HD, this notebook GPU is compatible with VDPAU for providing GPU-based video decoding and acceleration under Linux. We have already looked closely at the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix previously in many different articles and we absolutely love it! This NVIDIA-spawned video API for Linux can allow HD videos to be played on a $20 CPU and $30 GPU. High definition videos can even play fine under Linux with an Intel Atom CPU and NVIDIA ION GPU.

While one can easily play an HD video with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9000 and not experience a bottlenecked CPU no matter the video output, as can be seen from the graph above, when using VDPAU there is virtually no CPU usage at all. When using VDPAU with a Core 2 Quad and GTX 280M the CPU usage really is not even on the radar while with X-Video the load is at about 10~15%. Unfortunately, the Linux ACPI support with the System76 Bonobo Professional does not allow the battery consumption rate to be monitored, so we are unable to share with you in this article how the battery life is impacted during video playback.