Interesting, I haven’t noticed significant performance degradation. But, as always, YMMV!
Oh I should have probably mentioned before I have it set to Balanced Power (in Settings > Power). Probably should try some of these measurements in Performance and Power Saving mode as well.
I am unsure how everyone is getting down to such a lower wattage. Running just firefox for this forum and using tuned-adm powersave I am seeing around 9-10w consumed in powertop. I have never been able to get it below 6w or so. This is with 1 usb-c, 2 usb-a and an HDMI adapter. I tried removed the HDMI one but it didn’t do much. This is at lower brightness also.
Oh and Ubuntu 21.04 mostly stock.
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My results were all with tlp and the settings I described previously. Have you tried tlp and compared?
Browsing with Firefox I’m usually in the 6W range, though that can vary a lot by website (some sure love to spin the JavaScript…)
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I am also having a difficult time getting power consumption down, I see ~6.5w just from the screen backlight at %20. Can tlp and tuned be used in conjunction or should I use just one or the other? I have windows installed on the 250gb expansion, and powertop shows ~1.5w of power consumption and %100 usage, is there a way to minimize that?
I have pretty high “total system power” in hwinfo, usually 10w+. “cpu package power” seems to be around 4-5w.
You may need to set the cpu scheduler to schedutil or ondemand.
Interesting. I wasn’t able to get lower than C8 reported using the same settings, and that is with PSR enabled as well. I usually have it disabled because mine is stuttering with it on. I wonder what the difference in software and configuration is. Would you mind uploading the output of tlp-stat somewhere? I would like to compare it to mine when I get the chance.
How do I do that? Is that through tlp?
Sorry, I meant CPU governor! Here: How to Permanently Set CPU Governor to Performance in Linux - PreProgrammer But use ‘schedutil’ instead of ‘performance’
Thanks! I was surprised at how similar our configurations actually were already. Even kernel arguments are more-or-less simlar. Turns out, though, that if I turn on PSR and remove the SD card module, I get C10 55+% of the time with a browser open. So those are what are really holding me from dropping down.
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That’s strange. I also have an SD card module and haven’t had trouble reaching C10 with PSR enabled in Arch. However, I’ve found that the SD card module sucks ~1W of power even when empty. I’ve seen other posts mention it potentially being an issue with the retimer on the mainboard not entering a low power state when the expansion card is empty. Hopefully it gets fixed with a future firmware update.
Strange indeed. I’m running Arch, so there goes my “it might be kernel differences” guess. The only configuration I’m passing to the kernel that could have any effect at all is nowatchdog. I have an i5 model. I’m not sure if that could be the difference.
From what I see so far, I am getting great battery life. I run 35% screen brightness (turned it up to 100% once and almost blinded myself LOL)
[i7-1165G7 W/10]
But I also only keep pass-through modules in the unit normally (USB-C > USB-C & USB-C > USB-A)
I consider any others (HDMI, DP, SD, storage expansion) to be nothing more than a USB-C conversion dongle that happens to not stick out of the unit when using it.
Anything converting is going to take more power IMO since it is not on the motherboard. Firmware is not always going to be able to change that. So I set my expectations for that before I ever ordered the laptop.
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I have the i7 (non vPro). I’m using the testing repo kernel (5.14.1) because I had PSR glitches with 5.13.x. I’ll try adding Still able to enter C10 with nowatchdog to my boot params and see if I’m able to enter C10.nowatchdog.
You could try using 5.14.x to see if it fixes your issue?
Add the following AFTER your [core] entry in /etc/pacman.conf:
[testing]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
Then run sudo pacman -Syu testing/linux
I want to be using the system for a while before commenting fully. But I have NO complaints about it so far.
Also everyone’s use case is different - the mix of browsing, actual work, sleep / hibernation / shut down will all effect it.
Let’s just say for now that I just changed it up after using it since Friday. As always your mileage may vary.
That includes installing a lot of my software I use & browsing. Work so far: some PCB / Schematic design work (AutoTRAX DEX PCB), editing a video (DaVinci Resolve), 2 video conferences.
I have a DIY i7-1165G7, Windows 10 and I Shut Down when I am not using it. I only use Hibernation if I close the lid on battery… and I rarely do that… I Prefer to shut down.
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I was wondering exactly the same thing @Seth_Marinello! I finally got <5W numbers today in powertop when I switched fractional scaling off.
After starting the laptop on battery power I first ran sudo tlp start. Next I ran sudo powertop --auto-tune. Finally in the Power menu in Gnome settings windows, I selected “Power Saver”. Display is set at 15% brightness, 3:2 ratio, 200%, no fractional scaling.
(Interestingly, if I start tlp after powertop auto-tune, I see my HDMI card drawing ~1W in idle and it shows up as a “Bad” entry in powertop’s tunables tab.)
Were you using Xorg or Wayland? The power consumption numbers I’ve been reporting have been with Wayland and fractional scaling enabled.