1

My laptop (Dell Precision 7550) has been running extremely hot and consuming battery very quickly, even with no applications running. According to powertop, when running nothing but gnome and a single terminal, the system has been drawing in the range of 40-50 watts. However, according to the same tool, the power consumption for individual hardware components, such as CPU, GPU, RAM, display, radios, etc. only totals to around 4 watts. How can I diagnose what's consuming the missing 40+ watts?

I have disabled the discrete graphics card. Every process monitoring or cpu monitoring tool I have tried is reporting the cpu load is as close to zero as one could reasonably expect.

enter image description here

jayhendren
  • 8,224
  • 2
  • 30
  • 55
  • I don't know that tool, but each tool can be only as good as it supports the hardware. For example, the backlight power consumption is obviously wrong, because there is probably no support how to measure it (and the backlight really takes a lot!). No tool can cover all possible hardware components. Then, clocked signals are power hungry, including the display driver and the ethernet PHY producing the idle signal., both not neglectable. I suggest you open the device and look in with a thermal imager to identify the main heat source. – Philippos May 13 '22 at 07:27
  • @Philippos correct, that is why I asked this question. AFAIK powertop is an Intel tool, so it should be pretty accurate for the CPU and integrated GPU. Do you know of any tools that would be able to show accurate power consumption for other devices? – jayhendren May 13 '22 at 17:57

0 Answers0