I’ve been fighting to reduce energy consumption for 2+ years at this point, and it’s still pretty bad. I’ve tried everything. I’ve read the megathread. I’ve consulted AI. I’ve tried all the kernel parameters and UEFI parameters and dealt with baloo_file and lowered tlp’s battery performance all the way down to 5%. Software is current. Firmware is up to date.
At one point, about a year ago, light-load power usage was under 6W, but now it’s back up around 10W. How can it be that my Steam Deck can choke down light games at 5W, but this laptop demands 10W just to let me watch powertop?!?!
Is anyone in this boat with me? What tricks have you tried?
Don’t have a 12th, but have run 11th and 13th Gen Intel on Arch (plus endeavouros repo added on).
I use TLP and nothing else.
Agreed idle power consumption has been creeping up across the last year or two. I didn’t have solid data on this as I’ve also upgraded RAM, SSD, and wifi cards to ones that are all more power hungry also.
I just did a quick test, and got around 133000 incat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/current_now which is actually pretty close to my lowest result. Yes thats current, not wattage, which I interpret as 0.133A from the ~15.5V battery = ~2.1W
Test conditions:
FWL13
i5-13th CPU
Wifi BE200 but softblocked in rfkill
2x32GB RAM (Crucial IIRC)
Solidigm P41 SSD
booted to Arch, Hyprland desktop
keyboard backlight off
matte display set to brightnessctl s 1
My tlp.conf is the completely stock one that comes with the Arch package.
Adding wifi back on added about 2W
Typical use case (wifi on, browser launched with a dozen ish tabs open, screen full bright) is reading between 6.5 and 7.5W.
Got a 12th gen on Fedora Silverblue with a 2TB SkHynix P41, and 64GB RAM. Brightness @35%, bluetooth off, power profiles daemon on balanced, Firefox with 20-30 tabs, Evolution, and a terminal shows 4.5w at idle, with momentary spikes up 8-9w when loading a website dropping back down within 30 seconds to 5-6w and then another 30 seconds to the 4.5w. I regularly get 11+ hrs on the 61wh battery. Most apps are flatpaks and using Fifrefox flatpak specifically because I dont need to configure hardware acceleration for it as it comes setup and working by default. Not seeing anyting like you are. If I use tlp I can usually squeeze it even a little bit lower but considering that ppd has improved vastly the minor difference has made the juice not qorth the squeeze.
I did more testing and found that the network card seems to be a big source of power draw; there’s at least 2 watts of difference between bluetooth/wifi on and bluetooth/wifi off. This is on a fresh boot with no substantial programs running, though there are background processes which use the network.
I also noticed the notorious Framework HDMI card consuming 300+ milliwatts. It actually has a label in tlp! This is the 3rd-gen HDMI card, which is supposed to have very little passive power draw.
It’s difficult to get useful data about power consumption, because tlp shows the large majority of power consumption (usually 7+ watts) as being “display backlight”, and every other power consumer looks more-or-less as you’d expect. It’s as though there’s some phantom drain, and tlp adds up all the stuff it sees, notices that it’s nowhere near the battery’s reported discharge rate, and just goes, “uhhhh I guess it must be the display”.