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#1 2021-04-26 18:42:23

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Registered: 2020-11-04
Posts: 5

Intel/Nvidia power drain on XPS 17

I have a Dell XPS 17 that I've had for about half a year. It has an integrated Intel GPU and a GeForce RTX 2060 dGPU. Lately the laptop has started to draw a lot more power than it did previously, and I'm trying to figure out why.

Things I've noticed so far.

There's a massive difference in power consumption depending on which kernel I run. If I run the LTS kernel, powertop reports a power consumption of over 50W in idle. If I run the latest kernel it's just over 20W.

Although 20W is obviously a lot better than 50W, about a half a year ago, the laptop was consistently drawing less than 10W during normal use. So my battery life has effectively been more than halved, and I don't know what's causing the difference.

I suspect that it's some Nvidia power saving feature that isn't working as it did previously. The behavior I would prefer is that the Nvidia dGPU is completely turned off unless I run a program with the prime-run command.

If I run glxinfo it says that it's using the integrated GPU, but I suspect that the Nvidia card is still drawing a lot of power for some reason. Is there a way to force it off completely to see if it would make a difference?

glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer"

OpenGL renderer string: Mesa Intel(R) UHD Graphics (CML GT2)

Any help would be appreciated.

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