I have a Gigabyte Aero laptop that I have set up to dual boot Windows 10 and OpenSuse 15.2. I have had several versions of OpenSuSe on this platform (15.1 and 42.3). I have also had a number of laptops set up in a similar dual boot fashion for quite a few years before that. (A glutton for punishment, i know.) In all cases the power consumption and battery life have been pretty close between Windows and Linux. I have been very satisfied with the 15.2 installation, and it seems to be correctly configured for this laptop. With 15.2 I have about 2 hours of battery life and it’s estimates of runtime seem to be quite accurate. (And that is a reasonable runtime on a laptop like this.) I should also note that the power consumption is about 30W with occasional 50W spikes. On Windows 10 my batter life is similar until I turn on the “battery saving” features. Then my battery life jumps to 6-8 hours. I have never run the laptop completely out, and it seems that 8hr might be optimistic, but 6hr is certainly doable. I have made sure that my screen brightness and anything else I can adjust is the same between the 2 operating systems. Is there something I have missed? (I have the battery saving feature active in Linux also.)
It’s well known that the two biggest sources for energy consumption are the disks (particularly if rotating) and display.
Verify each of these are optimized and configured properly.
Next thing I’d look at is the processor’s stepping configuration which will depend on make, model and technology.
Keep in mind that when a processor fires up to max capability, it’s usually for a reason and unless you have a reason to be especially wary of power consumption, ordinarily you’d want to lean towards max capability, particularly if you’re not on battery power
Adding to what @tsu2 suggested in post #3, Win has a proprietary Intel SATA disk driver that can lower the disk interface power consumption when the disk is not in active use; such a driver is not available in Linux AFAIK (but I might not be up to date on this topic).
Also, LEAP uses an “On Demand” power governor by default and especially with newer processors a “battery save” mode on Win might be able to send a few cores to a deeper sleep state while still providing some responsiveness, even if I too would not use that unless I were away from a power outlet for many hours. TLP might help here somehow, but I would not expect magic results.
All in all, I’m not surprised to see that a Win “battery save” mode can extend battery life on a recent laptop to twice the time seen on a default Leap (or Linux generally) install.
As an aside, “Tuxedo” have announced a 1½ kg “Linux pure” Laptop, with a 15 inch 1920x1080 pixel display and, AMD Ryzen 7 4800H GPU (Vega 7 graphics) and, a claimed battery life of 20 hours …
Thanks for all the helpful replies. It does look like Gigabyte may have some proprietary stuff for windows that is helping. I also believe that windows may have some way to save more power on the NVIDIA card. I do not have any direct proof, but it seems like older installs without NVIDIA support had longer battery life than ones with NVIDIA support even when you are not using the card. Svyatko, “tlp” was already installed and looks very interesting. Also, on #2 you mention BTRFS. Is that because a journaling file system will run the HD more than one that does not keep a journal (NTFS)? (I cannot give up BTRFS on my system drive, I break stuff too often.)
So long as you leave the memory speed at the default of 2133 MT/s then, 22 W is possible …
If you increase the memory speed to what a Ryzen 5 3400G can reliably accept – 2933 MT/s – for such a system, you’ll possibly see an idle power consumption of around 25 W to 30 W …
Sure. You can tinker with all the fancy settings. I prefer Load Optimized Defaults, turn off CSM Support and turn on Power On By Keyboard. The built-in HDD sleeps as it is used for backup only. The big case needs no fans.
Typical values:
Idle:
Vcore: 719.00 mV
Vsoc: 894.00 mV
Tctl: +30.4°C
Tdie: +30.4°C
Icore: 4.00 A
Isoc: 3.75 A
Handbrake default settings:
Vcore: 1.33 V
Vsoc: 1.06 V
Tctl: +75.0°C
Tdie: +75.0°C
Icore: 71.00 A
Isoc: 5.00 A
Actually, both BTRFS and NTFS are journaling file systems.
The journaling feature is related to their ability to detect and auto repair small data errors.
It’s supposed to cause a slight disk latency but AFAIK should not significantly affect power consumption but this is likely a YMMV thing.
In any case, data integrity is supposed to almost always be a highest priority when it comes to storage and worth whatever penalties are incurred. Only in some cases like dedicated logs where data loss is not critical are where you’ll find people taking chances like RAID 0, that kind of stuff.