cronosun / atrofac

A library and a command line application to control the power plan, and the fan curve (CPU & GPU) of Asus Zephyrus G14 devices (might also work with other devices that use the Armoury Crate Service). Fanless mode is possible as long as the GPU & CPU temperatures are not too hot (even on battery).
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Atrofac keeps dgpu awake? #3

Open Vladjaye opened 4 years ago

Vladjaye commented 4 years ago

Hello, I'm still trying to eliminate the dgpu power draw I have, but I found something interesting.

It seems, in my case, that the atrofac-gui utility is actually what keeps my dgpu at 300mhz and 1-3W draw every few seconds. It is really weird because I never saw complains about the app conflict with dpu. As soon as I close the app - my dgpu is sleeping with 0 values. There are still some idle dgpu draw spikes, but they are quite rare (like once in 10-15 minutes or so) and happen only when I'm doing something else other than just idling. I forced IGPU both in Windows Graphics menu and Nvidia Control panel for the atrofac-gui and atrofac-cli - no changes, still 1-3w draw for dgpu.

I really like the app and would like to use it still, but at this moment it is battery killer in my case.

Thank You for your work!

P.S. I'm not using Armory Crate. P.P.S. I've used HWinFO64 for monitoring with polling rate of 2000ms. (default)

Vladjaye commented 4 years ago

Just applying the power profile in the app and closing it works though. :)

cronosun commented 4 years ago

Hi @Vladjaye ,

I had those spikes too, but only with the old version of atrofac (between 3-13 watts; https://github.com/cronosun/atrofac/tree/2020-05-26_update_interval_sec). The reason is that the old version re-applied the fan curve every 30 seconds (to overwrite the settings made by Armory Crate) -> this re-application caused the dGPU to wake up. The new version https://github.com/cronosun/atrofac/tree/release_2020_05_26 does no longer re-apply the fan curve (thus the recommendation to uninstall Armoury Crate). ... but I assume you're using the new version, right? (note: It's still possible that the new version re-applies the fan curve automatically if you changed the configuration file, see documentation about refresh_interval_sec).

This is how it should look like after a few minutes:

screen

This is what I get when I re-apply the fan curve:

screen_peak

... another cause for what you observe could be that there's some background task that gets started every few seconds and runs on the dGPU (however, this would not explain that closing atrofac solves the problem).