My desktop, after logging and doing nothing for a while, it draws around 155-160W, according to my power monitor on the wall.
My friend told me that’s way too much for idle, so I booted into Windows to test, login and sit for a while, it sits at 85-90W…which my friend said is still a lot, but nonetheless, way less than 155W.
Apparently, there is some power consumption to be shaved here.
…Unfortunately, I have a whole no PC week ahead, so not much trial and error I can do for now, but I can at least learn some basics reading on the phone.
So…what should I know diving into the world of lowering Power Consumption?
I don’t really do much with my Linux install. I get steam, fcitx5 for chinese input, dnf install *nvidia for drivers and stuff, enable flathub…that’s pretty much it.
My question is, is it normal to draw so much power doing nothing?
Either way, to make it better, where do I even start? Powertop?
Thanks for reading.
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System Info:
Operating System: Fedora Linux 42
KDE Plasma Version: 6.3.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.14.0
Qt Version: 6.9.0
Kernel Version: 6.14.6-300.fc42.x86_64 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 12 × AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6-Core Processor
Memory: 31.3 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti
Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
Product Name: X570 GAMING X
I’M AN IDIOT.
I thought I had no auto-start program, then I remembered I have GPUScreenRecorder with Instant Replay on, turning if off then it’s instant 85W idle power.
Never realized how power hungry this app is huh.
I can still learn how to how to reduce power consumption, please keep the replies going, but I’ll mark the post as solved now.