Great work putting this together! You’re results are more-or-less consistent with my own testing under basically the same methodology except I use power saving profiles instead of balanced and I don’t have a dGPU module. On my Arch install I see about 6W draw for 60hz and 7W at 165 during idle. It’ll dip as far as 5.4W, but I’ve never seen it go below that on Arch.
Arch:
- PPD v0.2
- KDE Plasma 6
- Kernel 6.7.9
I recently experimented with installing Gentoo however (which took me several days admittedly), and had some interesting battery findings. Once I got PPD and Plasma setup, my average idle draw was ~5W with semi-regular dips to 4.8W. This leads me to believe that there are still opportunities for optimization on Arch, but unfortunately I’m not certain where the power draw difference comes from. It could be due the nature of all applications being complied on-and-for the framework specifically, but I’m not certain. If I unplogged the expansion modules, I could reduce power draw by an additional 0.2W, down to 4.6W.
Gentoo:
- PPD v0.2
- KDE Plasma 5.x
- Kernel 6.8.1
I didn’t know about btop, I’ve been using powertop and polybar to gather usage stats. This app is awesome! Sharing the same interest for battery efficiency, I put together a minimum power-draw competition. Perhaps you’d be interested in participating.