In my experience, nvme drives won’t light the disk activity light, only sata drives will. I’ve got just the mainboard, and have an LED plugged into the HDD connector, and have seen it flash during bios post, but other than that nothing. I think you can control it via user space, will be checking that out at some point.
I can only speak for Linux, not Windows but there it is pretty much like that. I found a miniscule difference in idle TDP under “Performance”, compared to “Eco save” mode but it was not more than around 1-2W. The big difference was the higher max power limit when under full load.
I could imagine that for some the Eco mode could be useful, but it is really rather niche. If you want to limit power consumption under load and don’t mind having only roughly half the computational performance, you can with that mode.
In windows the two big things echo mode did was limit how fast the GPU goes (basically it under volts it), turns off all usb when it goes into power saving (makes it fun to wake up devices that use usb mice and keyboards). The rest of it makes a laptop battery last longer, but do little or nothing for a desktop.
The usb was hitting devices charging (like my wireless keyboard and mouse) so they did not charge when the computer was not in use…and then not waking properly. Honestly no one should run balanced mode on desktop in windows. Run a custom power profile or a high power one, because the pc performs better, and has none of the usb issues.
Yes, turning off all USB is nothing you would want on a Desktop system, and possibly even on Laptop as well. I do have the impression that is only a Windows issue though. I did not witness any USB issues on any power setting in Linux, even though I can’t rule out that it does reduce some interface speeds. In Linux the default setting of the Framework Desktop is Balanced. Is that the default setting in Windows as well, or is it Performance there?
The default in windows is “balanced”, and has the usb issue. The work around is spend time in the legacy control panel in windows, and switch to the “performance” power profile or build your own. To build your own, you adds power profile and then set dozens of power options like is the processor allowed to run at 100% and what the min power it can run at.
in most Linux UIs, the power profiles are no where near as aggressive as the “balanced” in windows, but it still a good idea to dig through the options under them. Like do you want your pc going to sleep while you are watching videos?
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No noise, but the system gets a lot of spurious power/suspend events on Fedora. Had to disable all power management or it shuts down after ten-fifteen minutes.
Could be that the power switch on my unit is shorted. Or maybe Fedora is just a POS as I have long suspected 
The biggest issue would be that the perforated side panel doesn’t install. The rear portion stops about 1mm above proper seating position, so you have to run it half-open.
From what I observed in the past using the likes of HWMonitor – and I just did it again to confirm, and granted this is with Intel desktop silicon – both the P-core and E-Core (yes, I know this AMD APU doesn’t have that) the CPU clock speed would immediately jump and stay locked at the turbo clock speed as soon as I switch to Performance, float normally when I switch to Balanced, and float more aggressively to the minimum clock speeds and limit the maximum clock speed sans turbo speeds when I switch to Power Saver. And in HWMonitor and HWiNFO and Fan Control I notice a heat soak over time; i.e. higher heat and my exhaust and two CPU cooler fans will run higher the longer I stay in Performance mode.
Yes, may be a different story with this APU, or AMD silicon in general, which I haven’t run for oh I dunno maybe 15 years or 20 or more years. I’ll be very interested to see how AMD behaves. But what you say it’s [typo, meant to type “isn’t”] valid as a blanket statement at least.
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Did you ever have any luck with the Cooler Master? It sounds like they’re still working on open-sourcing the controller driver, I’m on Linux & haven’t been able to make any kind of provisional contact with the device.
I haven’t. I’ve been dealing with other priorities so it hasn’t been on my front burner.
I was hoping someone would have found a fix by
I only hit two bumps, my CoolerMaster ARGB fan wasn’t lighting up at so I had to contact support. When I first booted up the computer I also noticed the fan spun a bit and then died on me, I had no idea this is normal behavior under their custom fans. The expansion slots where another issue, I could plug in a USB 2.0 external drive but anything that supported 3.0 did not work. Simply resetting those cables to the mainboard did the trick.
I’m still not able to boot into my BIOS from my DisplayPort connection, not sure what is happening there. Everything worked fine prior to the latest update since I was able to change some BIOS settings while I was messing with the CPU fan and other spare fans.
I had this same thought at some point, and yes I miss the comfort of physically seeing when there is disk activity. I might be just being paranoid, but I’d like to know when my computer is being hacked or running stuff without my permission.