Currently I have only one laptop, I use it for everything and it has an nvidia gpu and a 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-11800H. I have a mode which disables the GPU which i use when i am out and about. However I want to minimize battery use to a significant degree, so which out of the three should I have on? power-profiles-daemon or autocpu-freq or tlp, which is better for battery performance? I know ppd is configurable via desktop, so i have kde set to power saving mode, but I still want better if possible, is there something more i can be doing with ppd or would autocpu-freq or tlp work better?
I can’t speak on which is the best. I haven’t compared them on modern systems.
But what I will say is make sure you’re not artificially limiting your power levels or clock speed too much. Big fat Intel CPUs like that are power hogs when active. They need to reach an idle state. I have a laptop with an i9 11950h which is the same thing. But with the power plan on the lowest I get worse battery life and performance than if I just left it on balanced. But it depends on the workload. If there is no idle then power save might be best. But if you’re browsing the web and not constantly scrolling then balanced might just be better.
Is use tlp because i feel like it’s available on most distros. I’m not sure if one of these tools is better than the others though.
I prefer tlp, as it gives me more granular control than autocpu-freq, which I have also used. It allows me to retain control over certain things like USB auto-suspend behavior (a problem with some power utilities like powertop), and the audio powerdown on the headphone jack when on battery, but which was causing popping and audio cutting in after a delay whenever I started a video or application with audio.
Auto-cpufreq only changes the CPU governor based on your preference for load and power source. In my experience you need to disable the intel_pstate driver to see real gains in the powersave/conservative governors. That’s true for all three options.
Tlp can also manage power to radios, ports, devices. Gains are small over auto-cpufreq, and it can be a bit finicky not to lose some part you actually wanted to keep powered on.
I’m not very familiar with power-profiles-daemon, but I think it sets governor and rules for screen/sleep timeout. You’ll probably see better gains without intel_pstate there, too.
I would also like to know, I heard from somewhere that power profiles deamon is the modern solution and the other 2 are older, but all 3 are still supported so I think its personal preference. Tlp has more finegrained contol, and ppd has better defaults and “just works” for me, no idea about autocpu-freq.
power-profiles-daemon vs autocpu-freq vs tlp, which is better?
Yes.
(Edit: It’s a meme reply, as I don’t have a clue.)
Best you can do for the battery is turning down the screen brightness to the lowest setting where you can still see what’s on the screen. Mine is ususally at 20-30% brightness.
Mine is lowest when im out, do you have an opinion on which of the 3 tools to use
I simply just use the ppd, but my laptop is low power no dgpu anyway.
