Arch Linux

RandomRanger

Member

Registered: 2023-06-26

Posts: 40

What's your laptop's power draw on light load?

I'm working towards getting my power draw as optimized and efficient as possible and am curious how low you have gotten your average power draw. I've gotten my average draw down to ~8W. On my 65Wh battery this equates to about 8hrs of battery life under light use.

My setup and tweaks:
- Razer Blade 15 (2021 Base) + RTX 3070
- dGPU powered off
- auto-cpufreq for power optimizations

I'd like to get it down to ~5W, but idk if that's feasible. The 7-8W breakpoint appears quite difficult to pass.

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Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science.

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,008

Re: What's your laptop's power draw on light load?

How is your display brightness?
Have you tried shutting down some of your CPU cores? https://unix.stackexchange.com/question … r-on-linux

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Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature -- Michael Faraday
Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine. -- Alan Turing
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How to Ask Questions the Smart Way

RandomRanger

Member

Registered: 2023-06-26

Posts: 40

Re: What's your laptop's power draw on light load?

I experimented last night with 1% display brightness, disabling 4 of my 6 cores, running without a desktop environment in the virtual console, in airplane mode. This dropped my power usage from 8W to 7W, most of that likely coming from the backlight at 1%. As far as I can tell, 7W may be the absolute floor with 8W being the practical floor. Kinda bummed because I really wanted to hit 5W, but I'm already crazy low for the hardware I have, which is intended to run around 10-15W under light load. Maybe I'll discover/think of something that I missed though.

Tested conditions to reach 7W:
CPU - at min usage (2 cores active clocked at 1Ghz or less, powersave profile)
GPU - offline
radios - offline
display - at min usage
nvme ssds - no changes/optimized out of the box?
ram - no changes
software - no desktop environment, cpu utilization averages less than 1%

Last edited by RandomRanger (2023-06-30 12:52:43)

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Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science.

icar

Member

From: Catalunya

Registered: 2020-07-31

Posts: 482

Re: What's your laptop's power draw on light load?

Some audio chips don't power down. Might be worth checking it out.

RandomRanger

Member

Registered: 2023-06-26

Posts: 40

Re: What's your laptop's power draw on light load?

Some audio chips don't power down. Might be worth checking it out.

I'll definitely look into that, thanks for the tip!

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Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science.

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,008

Re: What's your laptop's power draw on light load?

What is your interest in this?  Is it to see how long you can get your laptop to run on a battery?  Or do you have an application that requires a battery powered computer to run for more than eight hours on a single charge?  If the later, you may want to consider ARM based system running Arch Linux ARM (a different distribution than Arch Linux)

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Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature -- Michael Faraday
Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine. -- Alan Turing
---
How to Ask Questions the Smart Way

RandomRanger

Member

Registered: 2023-06-26

Posts: 40

Re: What's your laptop's power draw on light load?

What is your interest in this?  Is it to see how long you can get your laptop to run on a battery?  Or do you have an application that requires a battery powered computer to run for more than eight hours on a single charge?  If the later, you may want to consider ARM based system running Arch Linux ARM (a different distribution than Arch Linux)

My interest is to push my laptop's battery life as far as it'll go for A) personal interest and fun, and B) close the gap between my gaming laptop's battery and a more battery efficient product.
I've considered experimenting with an ARM laptop as it'd be sufficient for we browsing, however I'm also trying to consolidate devices rather than expand the portfolio. I'd love to build a DIY raspi 4 laptop, but there's surprisingly little pre-existing products and engineering in this space.

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Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science.