Yves Bruyere, on 31 October 2012 - 02:31, said:
It's a old thread but I have the same issue and I think to know why. I can heard my fan spinning on my laptop with windows 8 while doing nothing and my task manager is almost at 0% on the processor. I have an HP Pavilion dv7 with AMD 4 core processor and ATI 2 GPU unit. 2 GPU is for one in low power mode and the other in high power mode. ex: while I'm not plugged, it will use the low power GPU instead of the high one.
My low power GPU is a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4200.
My high power GPU is a AMD Radeon HD 6300M.
But in Windows 8, these 2 GPU unit seem not to be able to communicate with each other correctly. Each need different instance of the driver. I don't know if it was both the same WDDM version 1.1 in windows 7, but I noticed that my high power GPU was using a WDDM version 1.2 and my low power was using WDDM 1.1. Two different drivers model version.
Currently today, if I have the mistake to update my high power GPU in windows update, my graphics on my laptop will run on it even if it's unplugged but in the both case, very slowly. So I have to keep it disabled and at the old version at all time. It's like to have a big issue with my low power GPU. I have to keep that way to keep high performance graphics with my low power GPU if I want to use Windows 8 correctly but not at full speed. Some games I can't play because of that.
At the end, with all that info, my conclusion is both my GPU is running even if I use only one. That I think explain why my laptop is using double the power than needed for nothing.
I don't know about with your laptop, but if you are using 2 GPU like mine, that can confirm my theory.
I would like some feedback about this. Thank you.
That's a driver issue. If you can't get the configuration-specific driver from HP to work in Windows 8 you're out of luck.
I have a hybrid graphics setup too. I can switch between my Intel HD Graphics and a proper nVidia GeForce card but unfortunately Windows 8 doesn't seem to like the drivers for it. The only option I had was to set switching to static in my BIOS, which means I have to reboot to switch between the two - and even then the nVidia Graphics just won't install since even those drivers are incompatible.
It's a common issue with exotic hardware configurations. When your hardware manufacturer no longer provides updates for new operating systems you're basically screwed - and there's not much you can do about it.