FW16 mystery power draw doesn't add up

So I don’t know what’s been going on, but my laptop has consistently been reporting draining at least 30 watts from the battery at any time. I have the 7940HS and the 7700S, but the dGPU is sleeping just fine, it doesn’t make sense. The GPU says it’s drawing seven watts for the ASIC and the CPU says it’s drawing nine watts for the entire package, which very much does not add up to 30.

Is it possible that it’s the RAM? I sprung for 96GB, has anyone with 64GB seen significant issues involving RAM power draw?

EDIT: It was the display. I completely missed it. There’s still a significant amount of mystery power draw, though. Just more like 5W instead of 15.

What’s your CPU/GPU utilization? 15W of unexplainable power draw is quite a bit, even if the display is at max brightness and etc.

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Is this with Windows or with Linux. If Linux, what Linux and what version kernel.

There is also the display, fans, keyboard backlight, ssds, wifi/bt, usb devices and all kinds of other stuff drawing power that aren’t the cpu/gpu. If I had to guess the display is probably the bulk of it.

Ram doesn’t draw a whole lot of power on this platform, definitely not when idle.

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USB A modules eat more power in certain slots and also nvme drives can suck power if busy

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What data are you basing this on?

specifically the two slots closest to the screen

also on linux there is a bug in pipewire where if it is used for handling webcams with libcamera it will keep the webcam opened constantly, leading to significant power consumption (see https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/2669#note_2252704 for a workaround)

edit: at least on the fw16 the camera switch causes the webcam to get disconnected from the usb bus (according to kernel logs). i think the new camera module for the fw13 (are the camera modules meant to be compatible between the fw13 and fw16? i think they were) doesnt get disconnected in this way though (instead it just fills its framebuffer with an all-black frame because apparently thats more likely to be gracefully handled by software)

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Windows 11.
CPU utilization floats around 10%, GPU utilization more like 2%. dGPU is powered off and not drawing power.
It’s almost definitely the display. Cranking the brightness ALL the way down pulls power draw into the realm of 15 watts again, for a bit, and then it drifts around and comes back to ~22-25. There’s still a lot of unexplained power draw, even with battery saver on, but its drifting up and down around that number makes me think it’s Windows’ fault. Back when I had a working Fedora install I could get it to sip 10 watts at the absolute minimum if I cranked everything down.

So there’s still some unexplained power draw - just not nearly as MUCH as I thought there was. My apologies on missing something so obvious.

Well that’s good to know. Really glad there’s a hardware switch now.

I don’t know about the mystery power draw, but with the 7840 and 7700s and 96 gb ram on windows with everything down I get around ~10w power usage (according to sleepstudy, which still seems excessive because with the same u chip I get half that or so on the 13), so 22-25 seems rather high. (edit: I should perhaps note the power draw was much higher on install, default windows settings were seemingly not good).