# Acer 5553g / Phenom N930 with -stable: basically success, but a few questions remain



## mathiasp (Sep 8, 2010)

This is basically a success report, with an additional question about hybrid graphics at the end.

I just installed -stable on a Acer 5553g, using the pcbsd 8.1 installer with 5Gig root, 450 gig zfs, the rest ntfs. 

The install and upgrade to -stable was eventless. The wired ethernet card (alc0) is only supported in -stable, but 8.1 gave me wireless (ath0), so everything worked out fine. I also added an sd card in the internal reader as l2arc. The disk is still slow, though.

The system shows only the cpus only capable of C1, even though I think they support C2 and C3 - I guess it's the bios, not much I can do I think.

The laptop has a hybrid hd4200 / hd5650 graphics system, and both cards work and can be choosen via pci id in xorg.conf. No 3d acceleration.

And there my last problems lies: both cards work, and both use power, and the laptop is not running cool and quiet even in win7: in freebsd its really loud (and hot: 58Â°C with started up gnome)

So I'm looking for any idea in switching off either card, or pointers to where I can dig up such information.

I allmost have a solution: the bios has a setting "only discrete graphics". If activated, xorg still uses the hd4200 (?) and the hd5650 seems to be deactivated (??): exactly the opposite of what I expected. The power use drops from ~35 to ~26w, which is nice for mobile use (~2:20 on battery), but there is a downside: my external monitor does not really work...

Any tips on how to deactivate the hd5650 without rebooting, or how to get the vga-out to work correctly with the dedicated graphics bios option would be most welcome.

Cheers, Mathias


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