ryzen 7840u + 32GB RAM + 512GB Samsung PM9A1(from my Lenovo Legion gaming laptop)+ stock wifi card . Idle power consumption is quite high compared to other posts from linux users in the community, almost always over 6W when I keep the laptop untouched for a while. Browsing local files will reach 7-8W, and mild browsing in Firefox easily lead to 10+W usage.
Since it’s not exactly ubuntu, some of the tunings from the official guide cannot be applied or don’t have much impact, like switching to oem kernel 6.5 yields similar power consumption. Considering that pop os ships newer kernel than Ubuntu 22.04 LTS(namely customized kernel 6.8), I don’t know if switching back to 6.5 is a good idea. Besides, System76 has their own power profile manager so ppd doesn’t seem to have major impact either(if at all…)
Right now I resort to auto-cpufreq and amd-epp-tool. The first one provides a config file to define default governor and EPP state, along with manual limitations to min & max frequency. Default settings are 400MHz and 1300MHz respectively. If I append “amd_pstate=passive” to kernel parameter, frequency will be limited to 400MHz, the laptop performs quite laggy. So I keep active pstate and limit max freq to 1000MHz. With amd-epp-tool I can make sure governor is set to powersave and EPP to power. However these tunings can’t lower power usage any further.
I’ve only dealt with debian based distros on my Lenovo gaming laptop in the past. And most of the university courses provide Ubuntu VM or instructions regarding .deb packages if necessary, so I don’t intend to switch to arch or fedora in the near future. It’s just Ubuntu UI never grew into me. It also needs some serious works in terms of nvidia driver before functioning properly on my gaming laptop, whereas pop os works perfectly when training machine learning models. That’s why I try to stick with it on FW13 as well. Maybe a bad choice?