Nouveau GeForce 400/500 Fermi On Linux 3.1
If there's any benefit of the Nouveau driver lacking fan control management support is that while it may lead to a more noisy system, at least the GPU core temperature is lower. With the GeForce GTX 460 fan being ramped-up constantly, there was little change in the core temperature while running the Warsow game at 1920 x 1080.
The system power consumption when running the Nouveau driver was also much less than the NVIDIA proprietary driver. This is similar to our earlier results when looking at Nouveau driver power management. The power results are in this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.
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