CPU boosting at max frequency even at idle

Hello, I’m a new Fedora user, just switched my laptop over from Mint 21.1

I’ve noticed a weird behavior with my CPU since making the switch where it seems it’ll try to boost as high as possible even at idle. I have an i7-1165G7 so that max is 2.8GHz

Here is what Htop is reporting right after rebooting the system. Nothing is running except what Fedora and Gnome launched themselves. As you can see, most cores are boosting to their max despite barely being used if at all.
This is a bit concerning for my CPU and battery health (the latter already not being in the greatest shape possible) as I fear the added power consumption would reduce the time it can stay unplugged and the laptop gets fairly hot to the touch below the chassis when watching YouTube videos to the point where the fans start to ramp up despite Htop reporting mid to high 50s
Even just writing this post the PC is getting a little bit warmer underneath the chassis and around the keyboard area to some extent.

I have only activated RPM fusion, flatpaks, installed codecs, the software I need, a couple Gnome extensions, HW video decode for intel iGPU and the intel media driver for VAAPI. I don’t know if I’ve missed anything I need to install but any idea is welcome as I’d like to keep my laptop in good shape for the longest possible

Thanks

I don’t know what you have running, but CPUs 1, 6,& 7 are far from being maxed out on speed.

If you were to install lm_sensors then run sensors-detect it would give you all the available sensors to read. That, along with gkrellm would allow a near-realtime monitoring of temps and other sensors. sensors would give you the command line version.

Running inxi -Fzxx would give you info about the whole system and inxi -Czxx would give the detailed cpu numbers for speed each time it is run.

2.8 GHz is not your boost frequency, it is your TDP-up base frequency according to intel.

I only just rebooted the laptop and ran htop at the time of the screenshot, I tried all the tools you mentioned and all of them reported the same temps, clocks and usage as htop

Ah thank you I might have misunderstood my CPU, the clock behavior seems to be normal then.

What’s worrying me though is why the laptop is heating up during mundane tasks such as watching a youtube video to the point where the fans ramp up.
Also the way lower battery life, I went to sleep at 2:30 am with 95% battery and opened up my laptop at 11:30 am and it only had 60% left.

2.8 GHz is still quite a lot, your CPU has a TDP down frequency of 1.2GHz.

Probably you don’t have hardware accelerated encoding enabled?

Did it work well under mint? Also you mean the laptop sleep right?

This might be the result of a suspend issue and not a cpu frequency issue. (9 hours and only used 35% battery does not seem totally unreasonable.)

What did the inxi output show as min & max speed for the cpus. Note that mine shows as below (2200/4208)

  Speed (MHz): avg: 3262 high: 4146 min/max: 2200/4208 boost: enabled cores:

Probably you don’t have hardware accelerated encoding enabled?

I double checked but I think it’s enabled, I have the HW video decode support for intel iGPU package installed from the software manager as well as the libva-intel-driver and intel-media-driver installed and firefox is reporting this
4b45bbf98605bbe72408c043907dec72de8706b0.png

Did it work well under mint? Also you mean the laptop sleep right?

Yes to both, the battery life was degraded on Mint as well due to my own fault but it’s draining noticeably faster on Fedora, which is weird because the Gnome power statistics tool is reporting a rate around 10W most of the time and more around 22W during video playback

What did the inxi output show as min & max speed for the cpus.

With Discord opened in the background, a paused youtube video and 3 firefox tabs this is what it’s reporting. Most cores are at 2.8GHz with only one being at 1.15GHz

Speed (MHz): avg: 2594 high: 2800 min/max: 400/4700

This might be the result of a suspend issue and not a cpu frequency issue.

I assumed the problem was the CPU behavior since from my understanding of hardware you generally need more power to sustain higher clocks, and 2.8GHz just to run the base Fedora without anything more seems a little excessive to me

That tells me the cpus are running at about half the max speed. gkrellm can show that as a graph of percentage load.

As far as the battery drain during “suspend” I only have a desktop and never suspend it so cannot assist with that. A good portion of the power draw may be related to the screen backlight if the system is not actually suspending properly.

Suspend issues are probably caused by the useless S0ix which replaced S3 sleep for no good reason. On my laptop (relatively old) which has S3 sleep it barely loses 1-2% per hour (of sleep), on my relative’s laptop (has i5 11th gen) it loses almost 10% per hour while on S0ix…

I don’t have much to suggest for your sleep issue other than check if you could use S3 sleep, or update the BIOS.

maybe related:
https://marc.info/?l=linux-pm&m=165884414614162&w=2

I don’t have much to suggest for your sleep issue other than check if you could use S3 sleep, or update the BIOS.

I updated the BIOS right after installing Fedora so I doubt that the issue, but looking through the /sys/power folder it would seem that the default sleep state is s2idle

cat /sys/power/state
   freeze mem disk
cat /sys/power/mem_sleep
   [s2idle]

I’ll try to change that to suspend-to-ram by replace the “s2idle” by “deep” which should offer better energy savings during sleep, at the cost of waking up time which I don’t mind.

There’s no telling whether it’ll work rn though so I’ll do that, charge my laptop, put it to sleep overnight then report whether it worked or not

Thanks for the help

Welp that was quicker than I thought it would be, deep sleep isn’t supported on this laptop by design from Dell. Can’t edit the mem_sleep file to add “deep”.
So I guess I’ll either have to get hibernation working or shut off my laptop completely when I know I won’t use it for a couple hours straight.