GPU drawing excess power despite being inactive on nvidia prime laptop

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1

I own a Dell Precision 5750 with the intel 10875H and quadro rtx 3000, currently on the latest workstation edition of fedora. As of writing this my laptop has a small but still non negligible issue where the gpu doesn’t really go into cold mode, it stays active. (it draws thus 4W, but I’d like it to not draw 4 W) I found one forum from arch linux users that had a similar problem, but by following their steps (not quite either just one renaming file 10_nvidia.json to 90_nvidia.json) I couldn’t fix it myself.
If you need anything contact me I can give you anything to help me.
(also here’s nvidia-smi)
Fri Apr 17 16:29:54 2026
±----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 580.142 Driver Version: 580.142 CUDA Version: 13.0 |
±----------------------------------------±-----------------------±---------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M | Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap | Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
| 0 Quadro RTX 3000 Off | 00000000:01:00.0 Off | N/A |
| N/A 47C P8 4W / 30W | 2MiB / 6144MiB | 0% Default |
| | | N/A |
±----------------------------------------±-----------------------±---------------------+

±----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: |
| GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory |
| ID ID Usage |
|=========================================================================================|
| No running processes found |
±----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Thank you for helping me!

2

See if you can disable it in the bios,
and look into switcheroo and see if that can turn it off.

3

unfortunately neither my BIOS or switcheroo offer solutions to disabling the Dgpu

4

The only GPU that may be controlled by bios would be the iGPU.
The system, by default always uses the iGPU unless there is a graphics intensive app that requires the dGPU.
Switcheroo can select the GPU to use, but AFAIK has no control on turning them on or off.

I believe you would have a few options.

  1. Disable the iGPU in bios and use only the dGPU (minimal if any power savings)
  2. Leave it as is and accept the small power drain from having the dGPU available when needed
  3. Open the laptop and remove the dGPU so it does not drain power. This may be difficult depending on the design of the laptop.

Is that tiny 4W power drain enough to demand a lot of effort to stop it? How long can the laptop run on battery as it is? How much longer time would you gain by eliminating that tiny power drain? Is it worth eliminating the potential for handling high resolution graphics just to have a short time of additional operation on battery?

I believe the best choice is either 1 or 2 above.

5

Are you using CUDA?