Picked up a 3700x and asrock x470 taichi ultimate for use as a homelab/nas box. Installed proxmox 6 on it and idle power consumption is ~10watts higher in proxmox (debian buster) than windows 10 it seems? This is my first amd processor in over a decade so i’m totally out of touch with how anything power saving related works in linux in amd land. I noticed patches for CPPC are pending (I can’t post links yet)?
Anyways, are there any easy tweaks I can do/places to check to enable better idle power consumption on this thing as it’s on 24/7 and I don’t need the absolute best performance for my use case? Thanks for any help!
What kernel version are you running (something like 4.19?). I’m running the latest 5.2.2 on Arch and seeing lower or equivalent idle power (I’ve been doing some system tweaking so won’t be able to really compare apples to apples for a bit). You might try to poke at governors and acpi_cpufreq but the Ryzen chip should be smart enough to sleep/downclock itself. You can maybe adjust the offset voltage (or disable turboing) in the BIOS of your board as well as some stuff to poke at.
10W x 8760h = 87kWh/yr. At $0.25/kWh, that’s about $20, which I guess isn’t nothing, but just something to think about before you put too much time into this…