Solving Overheat Problems in PC With Dual AMD/Intel Graphics in Linux

I used to own HP Pavilion dv3 2315-tx. In 2010, it was a good notebook with competitive price.

However, there is one problem that bugs me the most : that laptop has two graphics mode : Discrete (AMD) for gaming and graphics intensive tasks and Integrated (Intel) for general tasks.

The switching method works out of the box in Windows, but not in Linux.

The Linux boot process will load both kernel modules , namely radeon and i915 (the names may differ depends on your machine) thus producing unnecessary heat.

However, you can turn off the Discrete graphics to overcome over heating and preserve battery life.
First, I assume you use the open source driver, not the one provided by AMD.

I won't post the solution here as someone has explained in detail.

If you use non systemd managed distro (such as Ubuntu), you may refer to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HybridGraphics

If you use systemd managed distro (such as Arch, Fedora,etc) good news to you! Someone has created a systemd service that allows you to automatically turn off the discrete graphics at boot time. https://github.com/fredoche/vgaswitcheroo_systemd

Note that if you switch off Discrete Graphics after you load X, don't forget to turn it on again (exceptions if you use solution no. 2) or you may experience a Kernel Panic.

For NVIDIA-Intel, I am not sure whether the Bumblebee method really works or not.