Power Usage

Recent upgrades to the GPU and CPU increases the maximum power draw of these by twice the amount previously. Maximum power draw of 485W (340W for GPU + 145W for CPU). Since my PSU is only 650W, I needed to check actual power draw since I don’t have much headroom now before possibly overloading my power supply and my UPS.

CPU power usage

You can monitor CPU power usage easily on the command line with turbostat utility and ttyplot

sudo turbostat --Summary --quiet --show PkgWatt --interval 1 | gawk '{ printf("%.2f\n" , $1); fflush(); }' | ttyplot -s 100 -t "Turbostat - CPU Power (watts)" -u "watts"

Source: Binary Tides

Enabling Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) gives about 10% performance increase but at cost of pushing the CPU to 216W. So probably safer to leave it on auto and stick the 140W standard limit, and be a bit more efficient.

GPU Usage

Have shared this previously. There is an excellent utility written by Umio-Yasano AMDGPU Topthat provides detailed stats on AMD GPU usage both CLI and GUI. The Sapphire Pulse 9070XT runs as rated at about 304W under load.

Suspend on Gigabyte B550 motherboards

Speaking of power usage, finally fixed the issue with my PC not being able to suspend. Suspend wasn’t working that great a few years ago with display and audio issues, so never bothered to fix the problem the system immediately waking up after suspending.

Turns out the on is due is a specific issue related to Gigabyte motherboards and NVME.

The fix can be found here: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=2004037#p2004037

With Linux kernel 6.14, latest AMDGPU open source drivers and bios updates, suspend and resume is working now. This should save a bit of energy when I’m away from the PC for extended periods, but also bit of a productivity boost in being able continue immediately where I left things last, without finding and reloading everything.