Power saving tips

[ksullivan86]

I have noticed my system is running higher watts than I would like, after looking at power top It looks like I only have up to c-3 state. On the same hardware with same bios setting I was seeing at last c-8 on unraid.

I am sure there are some simple tips to fix this???

 

[Dunuin]

Did you already switch the CPU governor to something more efficient?: https://wiki.debian.org/CpuFrequencyScaling

Sometimes added PCIe cards will prevent lower C-states but then those shouldn't work in unraid as well.

 

[zenowl77]

Personally i always disable turbo boost.(usually found in the bios) In my opinion it just isn’t worth the power, heat spikes, possible decrease in lifespan (and sometimes risk of instability) for the small difference in performance.

Here are a few examples of intel 10-11th gen cpus
stock TDP (PL1) VS Turbo (PL2)

 

[ksullivan86]

Did you already switch the CPU governor to something more efficient?: https://wiki.debian.org/CpuFrequencyScaling

Sometimes added PCIe cards will prevent lower C-states but then those shouldn't work in unraid as well.

the only pcie card I have have is my GPU intel arc a770 and I know that it supports the lowest idle(at least in windows)

 

[gfngfn256]

Apart from your c-states situation (which needs addressing), are you running similar processes Unraid vs PVE; VMs & LXCs etc? Also what magnitude of power consumption are we talking about?

 

[ksullivan86]

Apart from your c-states situation (which needs addressing), are you running similar processes Unraid vs PVE; VMs & LXCs etc? Also what magnitude of power consumption are we talking about?

actually after looking at the numbers again my idle is very close to unraid except the peaks are much higher i am assuming do to the cpu governance, in unraid I had power savings mode turned on so I wasn't using turbo. Not entirely sure how to change the governance without going into each setting and changing performance to power save for each thread so 28 times.

you can see on the 14th I went from unraid to proxmox

 

[Dunuin]

Not entirely sure how to change the governance without going into each setting and changing performance to power save for each thread so 28 times.

I added this to my /etc/crontab to set the mode for all cores after reboot:

# schedutil instead of performance for intel_pstate governor
@reboot         root    echo "schedutil" | tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor >/var/log/cron.log 2>&1

You could edit this to match your CPU and prefered mode.

 

[zenowl77]

you can also check these scripts out there are a few very helpful ones including one for cpu governors

https://helper-scripts.com/

also turbo will still be active when hitting max frequency / under load unless disabled in the bios or in linux it will just be much much less frequent with the right governor (and wouldn't come on if the cpu is never under load) i think it has potential to be the biggest power saving tweak beyond that you might save a few watts here and there, you can check all your voltages to make sure they are tuned in right for one, some motherboards can overvolt things or have high defaults underclocking is also a possibility although you should be VERY careful playing with voltages / underclocking and make sure you really test stability.

best done in bios but here is how in linux

echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo

to survive reboot you will want to do the same as above and add this to crontab too

@reboot         root    echo "1" | tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo

 

[Dunuin]

Its also possible to freely limit the max frequency in a similar way.

 

[zenowl77]

Its also possible to freely limit the max frequency in a similar way.

Definitely and a great idea if you’re not stressing the cpu much, as in general the cpu will be one of the most power consuming components besides a gpu if you have a high end model, everything else uses so little you will be lucky to save a watt or two here and there