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As always, my love for the open source and Linux community continues. When a company doesn't do something officially, someone else comes along and does it. GreenWithEnvy is a recent one, to allow NVIDIA GPU owners to tinker with their hardware.

It will give you the ability to get a read-out of temperatures, fan speeds, clock speeds, do a little overclocking and more. Also, another nifty feature is the ability to make custom profiles to adjust fan speed based on the GPU temperature which is awesome.

For the Overclock ability to work, you need to enable "Coolbits" which allows you to use various unsupported features with NVIDIA GPUs on Linux. It's easy enough to do in terminal, like this Ubuntu example:

sudo nvidia-xconfig --cool-bits=8

More on what the number means in the NVIDIA readme here under the 'Option "Coolbits" "integer"' heading.

Fair warning though, do so at your own expense. Overclocking can cause damage if not done very carefully, especially with the extra power needed and the heat that comes with it.

See more on the official GitLab page with instructions on how to easily install with Flatpak from Flathub.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Apps, Hardware
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26 comments
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DasCapschen Feb 6, 2019
Now we just need any kind of tool for AMD cards...
lejimster Feb 6, 2019
Now we just need any kind of tool for AMD cards...

We do... With WattmanGTK, unfortunately the author has been busy and hasn't had time to get it fully working.

It currently reads the values and spits out script you can apply manually. Although it doesn't work with Vega atm, I had to add my own overclock values to the script to get Vega overclocking work.

Times like this when I wish I had learned how to code, I would love to contribute to a project like this.
TheLinuxPleb Feb 6, 2019
The coolest thing to see would be something like Throttlestop. Now that would allow so much tweaking possibilities for cpu's.
buenaventura Feb 6, 2019
I dont think I dare to do this with my laptop gtx1060, it would probably shorten lifespan I guess?
Eike Feb 6, 2019
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I dont think I dare to do this with my laptop gtx1060, it would probably shorten lifespan I guess?

For sure shorten uptime with a single battery charge, probably shorten overall lifetime.
But then, nobody knows if the later will be shortened from 7 to 6 or from 2 to 1 year...
I wouldn't do it, at least not with my primary hardware.

(Your mileage may vary. E. g. it may be shortened. :D )


Last edited by Eike on 6 February 2019 at 3:49 pm UTC
PlutonMaster Feb 6, 2019
I just set up power limit from my GTX 1060 3GB(120W>140W)
I don't care about overclocking, but still ok program.
Ehvis Feb 6, 2019
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The most interesting thing I see there is a fan profile. I really need to change mine, but at first glance I didn't see anything in the nvidia documentation about setting a custom profile.
Werner Feb 6, 2019
hmm for me it doesn't work, it just shows empty ui, could it be that it doesn't support Nvidia 418.30
pb Feb 6, 2019
I have a laptop with 1060 gpu set at discrete, I wonder if I could downpower the card with this tool to avoid the fan noise during normal usage (non-gaming). Does it make the changes in real time or does it require reboot?


Last edited by pb on 6 February 2019 at 4:35 pm UTC
Xpander Feb 6, 2019
hmm for me it doesn't work, it just shows empty ui, could it be that it doesn't support Nvidia 418.30

works for me with 418.30

![


I have a laptop with 1060 gpu set at discrete, I wonder if I could downpower the card with this tool to avoid the fan noise during normal usage (non-gaming). Does it make the changes in real time or does it require reboot?

real time. Only X restart is needed if you save the coolbits into xorg


Last edited by Xpander on 6 February 2019 at 6:14 pm UTC
Saulsecsiramirez Feb 6, 2019
"That's Hot!" See what I did there?
axredneck Feb 6, 2019
I dont think I dare to do this with my laptop gtx1060, it would probably shorten lifespan I guess?
Up to now, any reports of overclocking hardware shortens the lifespan is all guesswork.
It will take years of extensive testing on lots of identical hardware to find the average lifespan of a graphics card. No one has done it yet. But yet there are people who gave overclocked their systems and ran them for much longer than the average time for upgrade.
However, in your case I wouldn't try it with a laptop because of the lack of cooling.
I'm sure overclock will shorten lifespan of laptop's battery.
Skipperio Feb 6, 2019
it's about time we get something like this,now i wish we had a msi afterburner type program then i would be in heaven.
and RTSS Rivatuner Statistics Server
Gazoche Feb 7, 2019
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It's easy enough to do in terminal, like this Ubuntu example:

sudo nvidia-xconfig --cool-bits=8

I wouldn't recommend that. nvidia-xconfig creates a new auto-generated xorg configuration file in /etc/X11/, however that configuration file filled with a lot of outdated stuff which may break your display server. Not to mention it will conflict with your existing xorg.conf.
Gazoche Feb 7, 2019
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I have a laptop with 1060 gpu set at discrete, I wonder if I could downpower the card with this tool to avoid the fan noise during normal usage (non-gaming). Does it make the changes in real time or does it require reboot?
It should be immediate.
Note that the Nvidia driver already downclocks on its own : if you are not gaming or doing any intensive stuff, the card hovers at a low power mode until it's needed.
pb Feb 7, 2019
Note that the Nvidia driver already downclocks on its own : if you are not gaming or doing any intensive stuff, the card hovers at a low power mode until it's needed.

Yeah, but the card jumps from 6W / 139 MHz right to 28W / 1404 MHz just because I switch a window or open a new tab in the browser, and soon after that the fan starts speeding up. I don't think it's necessary for simple web browsing and I was wondering if it was possible to keep the card underperform most of the time (pretending to be a humble intel gpu ;-) and switch the profile only when I want to do some serious gaming. The thing is, I don't know much about hardware and I don't want to brick my laptop, so I'm yet to convince myself to try it...
andy155 Feb 7, 2019
its a mess ;P
callcifer Feb 7, 2019
This looked cool (no pun intended), untill I saw the requirements. What the? I'm not installing flatpak just for this and why on earth is there a COC.

Nice idea but smells of poltics. NVIDIA's settings widget on the other hand is simple enough to patch.

You don't have to use flatpak, it's just the developer's preferred way of distributing the app.

And the COC is, by definition, for contributors which you are not, so your "poltics" should be safe.
Liam Dawe Feb 7, 2019
It's easy enough to do in terminal, like this Ubuntu example:

sudo nvidia-xconfig --cool-bits=8

I wouldn't recommend that. nvidia-xconfig creates a new auto-generated xorg configuration file in /etc/X11/, however that configuration file filled with a lot of outdated stuff which may break your display server. Not to mention it will conflict with your existing xorg.conf.
Worked fine for me, no issues at all.
Zuul Feb 7, 2019
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/greenwithenvy-an-impressive-tool-for-overclocking-nvidia-gpus.13521/comment_id=148004
YEAH I really don't need overclockin seeing I don't play games past 2013 but it really pisses me off not being able to. Not that it really matters anyways with a Fury X
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