@Michael_Lingelbach no worries! I wanted to try out tuned at some point, anyways 
Yeah, I dedicate the front left slot to it but have tried other slots – same thing. Hmm, just to confirm, if you unplug the HDMI card completely does your lowest idle power remain the same?
From my previous testing, with just a terminal running Powertop:
powertop --auto-tune, which turns all tunables to Good, seemed to save around 0.3W during idle vs. the defaults.
Note that each setting can and probably should be tested for stability/side-effects/power savings, and extra steps are needed to persist the settings upon reboot. I’m currently using Powertop just for monitoring and not adjusting tunables to avoid any harmful side-effects, though.
In prior testing, I noticed that power-profile-daemon’s power-saver profile idled about 0.5W lower than the balanced profile, with nothing open but a terminal showing Powertop.
7 hours would be 55Wh/7 hours ~= 7.857W on average, which I would say is in line with what I’ve noticed just with normal browsing – but of course, these are very rough estimates.
Edit: in the spirit of not misleading anyone, the better wording would be my own varied/constant browsing, which can also vary wildly between which browser I’m using, the websites I visit, the number of tabs open, the idling time between scrolling/typing/video-watching. I can sit on a few resource-light websites/tabs, just reading, and maybe achieve 10 hours (5.5W average usage).
With that edit being typed, does anyone have any suggestions for cross-platform and/or Linux battery benchmark tools/standardization? MobileMark isn’t available on Linux, would be nice imo if people could see battery run times (perhaps of various tasks) with a detailed breakdown of peoples’ hardware/settings!
Some notes on power-profiles-daemon:
Fedora 34’s current stable version is 0.8.1, which does not support saving the last used profile after reboot. Defaults on boot to the balanced profile. 0.9.0 does support it (currently available on Fedora 35 stable), along with this neat feature:
support for “holding” a power profile while running a task
or application, making it possible to switch to a performance profile during
a compilation, or to a power-saver profile when low on battery, reverting to
the original profile when done.
Running powerprofilesctl list:
performance:
Driver: intel_pstate
Inhibited: no
* balanced:
Driver: intel_pstate
power-saver:
Driver: intel_pstate
powerprofilesctl get (currently active profile)
powerprofilesctl set power-saver|balanced|performance
Fedora 35 (Changes/Power Profiles Daemon - Fedora Project Wiki):
will install power-profiles-daemon in Fedora Workstation and enable it by default.
Side-note, maybe some of this info should go under
and/or
not sure how to proceed, though, so I’m just going to link the two pages 