Can you disable the NVidia GPU?

I know this sounds sacrilegious, but can you disable the onboard NVidia GPU in an Alienware 17 R3 with 970M? I would like to run some benchmarks against HD graphics built in to the i7-6700HQ.

 

Should be possible using FN + F7 unless you have a 3D / 120Hz display.

 

I have a 4K display, but as far as I know, it isn't 3D or 120Hz. However, FN+F7 does nothing. There is also nothing in the Intel HD graphics settings. BUT, I did find in the Nvidia settings panel, under 3D settings that you can select NVidia graphics, integrated graphics, or let the system determine which is best (I'm paraphrasing). If I select Integrated graphics, I don't know if the 970M is disabled, but it certainly doesn't get used, as indicated by the benchmark results.

Something I noted is that it doesn't have a problem switching to Integrated graphics, but when I changed to use the dedicated NVidia graphics, I had to reboot for those changes to go into effect. But I didn't receive any sort of indication from the control panel that a reboot would be necessary.

And I can confirm that the integrated Intel HD 530 graphics is indeed faster (~5-10%) than a dedicated NVidia GTX9800M (8 years old). Intel's integrated graphics has come a long way in the last few years. Intel is not approaching what current dedicated high end GPUs can do, but I think you could play older games at decent resolution with a lot of the pretty stuff set high (maybe not max), and still have decent framerates. I was not expecting that.

 

No, that is not possible with the 17R2/3.

You have permanent optimus for the display output.


To run benchmark with iGPU, you need to set this manually in Nvidia control panel per app basis.