My X570 Aorus Master with an Ryzen 3700X is using a lot of power at idle. Lowest I’ve seen from the wall is 138watts, but more typical is 150 to 170. All the review sites I’ve seen mention idle power consumption for the entire system around 70 watts or less.
Is there a bios setting somewhere that’s turned on by default which makes it use that much power at idle?
I have 2 nvme drives, a 280X and a 5700XT plugged in. It’s using more power at idle, than my previous piledriver setup which had multiple spinning rust drives and two 280X gpus.
How did you measure this?
You could directly measure it with a killawatt.
Also which psu do you use?
Because that also has some impact on actual TPD from the wall.
I’m using a smartplug to measure it and I’m using a Coolermaster V1000 psu. I reflashed and reset the bios and disconnected just about all usb-devices and checked to make sure nothing was running in the background, which got me down to about 110 Watt. Still quite a bit higher than I was expecting.
However googling other people with X570 motherboards it seems that 110 Watts is apparently not that unusual. While there seem to be people mentioning 50-70 watts idle, it seems 150-170 Watts at idle for the Aorus Master seems to be quite common.
One odd thing I’ve noticed is that I get a huge improvement after turning on my second gpu within a vfio passthrough vm. Even after shutting down the vm. I suspect you need a driver loaded and screen attached to get the card to set itself to a low power state.
Ok, seeing all those reviewers showing 50-70 watt idle, I was a bit worried something was wrong with my system using more than double that, 2nd gpu should not add that much when not in use. I’ve now got the system hovering between 90 and110 Watts on linux.
Running windows on bare metal however I can’t get it below 170 even with all background services and one gpu shut down. Oddly enough I’m pretty sure that under similar load the power draw seems to be a lot closer, which kinda suggest windows is not throttling down the cpu.
Strangely enough I don’t have that issue when running windows 10 in a VM. On the same machine with the second GPU passed through and active, Steam downloading and installing games in the background and the system hovers between 130-150. I find it really odd that running both linux and windows at the same time uses less power than just running windows 10 bare metal and with one gpu shut down?
Haven’t figured out yet why Windows 10 in a vm is way more power efficient than windows 10 bare metal.
I did get power below 100 watt idle even with 2 gpus, but with some workarounds. First I set the TDP in the bios to 65watts which kinda is what my 3700X was rated for, but still that dropped idle wattage by 10 to 20. Second thing is that AMDs new 5000 gpus apparently behave differently to my old 280X when powered on but not active. When having my 5700XT set to passthrough I apparently have to power up and shut down a vm to set to card to a low power state, which seems to be a difference of about 50 Watts.
Hopefully whatever AMD did to get the 5700XT (more) stable with their latest driver update will also get implemented on Linux, because for now the hard crashes and glitches on Linux are unacceptable.