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Save some power on CPU p-states

Posted: Wed Oct 02, 2019 12:27 pm
by MeeLee
When you're folding with NVIDIA GPUs, the driver will lock each GPU into a CPU thread.
It'll keep this thread active, by feeding it 'idle data'.

On a modern Intel CPU, with turbo boost technology, this means that the CPU will also run continuously in this turbo boost speed range.

When an Intel CPU is rated for (eg) 3Ghz, but has a boost speed of (eg) 3.8Ghz, the total power consumption under load can almost double from 3Ghz to 3.8Ghz.

To remain active in a lower power state, there are a few things that can be done.
1- Disable turbo boost from bios
2- In Windows one can set the power states, by adjusting CPU percentage load, like explained here:
https://superuser.com/questions/323738/ ... management

Doing all this correctly, can save a few unnecessary wasted watts, at no, or virtually no noticeable performance loss.
One can lower the CPU p state by too much, causing the CPU to be a bottleneck.

I believe I've made a thread before with the minimum CPU frequency needs for Nvidia RTX cards. Basically, as long as you're running at 3Ghz or above continuously, there's no noticeable performance loss for RTX 2080 GPUs or below.
Happy tuning!

Re: Save some power on CPU p-states

Posted: Thu Oct 03, 2019 6:57 am
by antropofob
Running four 1060s on AthlonII X4 downclocked to 1.8GHz on Linux with no PPD loss.