I am using laptop and I'm trying to save power.

[johntyc10]

I have googled, searched forums and even asking gpt5 for advice (potential skill issue here since i'm not that good at searching). However the power just wont go below 20W, according to powerstat, tlp and upower -d. My ideal goal is to lower the power consumption to 10-15W. I think it is worth noting that i use 13th Gen Intel i5-13450HX cpu and have a 4050 dgpu (hybrid graphics).

I tried:

• setting cpu governor to powersave
• setting power profile to powersave
• set both min and max cpu freq to 800MHz because there are seemingly no option for locking cpu frequency[1].
• dimming the screen
• turn off all rgb
• force agressive aspm (in nixos config: boot.kernelParams += [ "pcie_aspm=force" ]) (does it even help?)
• disable dgpu by selecting "uma graphics" in bios, and it seems to be helping, since "lspci -nnk" shows only the intel igpu and no nvidia entries at all (no 10de:... vendor). afaik bios uma graphics seems to have fully hidden the 4050 from the os, but i'm not sure if this fully cuts the power off.
• use tlp to manage my power

which all yield ~20W, regardless of doing all of them at once or not

I also tried:

• installing the nvidia proprietary driver and suspending the gpu from there

which yield 35W. which means disabling the dgpu lowered the power consumption by ~10W.

Steps to reproduce: Buy Lenovo LOQ 15IRX9, install nixos to the internal disk and enable uma graphics setting in bios

It seems like I've hit a bottleneck. I am skeptical on whether lowering the power consumption is possible, given the performance focused cpu. What am i missing here? Any help is greatly appreciated!


neofetch results:
OS: NixOS 25.11.20250719.c87b95e (Xantusia) x86_64
Host: LENOVO LNVNB161216
Kernel: 6.15.7
Uptime: 9 mins
Packages: 1513 (nix-system), 1399 (nix-user)
Shell: bash 5.2.37
Resolution: 1920x1080
DE: Plasma 6.4.3 (Wayland)
WM: kwin
Icons: breeze-dark [GTK2/3]
Terminal: .konsole-wrappe
CPU: 13th Gen Intel i5-13450HX (16) @ 800MHz
GPU: Intel Raptor Lake-S UHD Graphics
Memory: 2787MiB / 15700MiB


[1]: /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies does not exist. also running "cd /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate && paste <(ls *) <(cat *) | column -s $'\t' -t" the output does not have field "num_pstates", which is something related to frequency steps.
for reference: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=329470 https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/443767/get-all-available-frequency-steps

 

[Brickwizard]

Welcome to the forums, did your AI return this article

Linux power management guide for laptops | PCsuggest

For laptops, battery life is one of the most important point to determine it's usability, […]

www.pcsuggest.com

 

[johntyc10]

Welcome to the forums, did your AI return this article

Linux power management guide for laptops | PCsuggest

For laptops, battery life is one of the most important point to determine it's usability, […]

www.pcsuggest.com

my AI didnt return that, thanks!! i will look into that

 

[CaffeineAddict]

However the power just wont go below 20W

My ideal goal is to lower the power consumption to 10-15W

Given your particular GPU alone needs 35 - 115 W the logical question is what stats do you look at to conclude your system goes down to 20 W? let alone to bring it down to 10 W.

 

[johntyc10]

Given your particular GPU alone needs 35 - 115 W the logical question is what stats do you look at to conclude your system goes down to 20 W? let alone to bring it down to 10 W.

powerstat, tlp and upower all tell me my laptop is consuming ~20-30W sometimes. But now that you mention it my laptop must be already running in very low power consumption. With that said, i see other people going to lecture with a gaming laptop, but their battery life is somehow enough to last for the whole lecture, which is 3h long, and they dont seem to care about power consumption either, like full blast rgb. That is what confuses me

 

[CaffeineAddict]

i see other people going to lecture with a gaming laptop, but their battery life is somehow enough to last for the whole lecture, which is 3h long, and they dont seem to care about power consumption either, like full blast rgb. That is what confuses me

You mean in YT videos?
How do you know they're running on battery?

In any case for gaming you want your laptop to be connected to AC with maximum performance profile.

 

[johntyc10]

You mean in YT videos?
How do you know they're running on battery?

In any case for gaming you want your laptop to be connected to AC with maximum performance profile.

I went to the lecture myself
As to how i know theyre running on battery, theyre sitting right next to me

And yes i know gaming laptops are not supposed to be portable, its just me thinking i could do better than 20W

 

[CaffeineAddict]

If your laptop can't withstand 3 hours first thing you can do is check your battery specs, probably somewhere in manuals, or if you know exact model search online, then based on that figure out what's the battery duration according to specs.
You can also find it in laptop specs online.

This will let you know for how much it should last vs for how much it actually does last.

Then depending on battery there may be safety precautions regarding first charge and how to charge it.
Some batteries for instance require to be fully charged prior first use otherwise they lose on longevity.

 

[Brickwizard]

i see other people going to lecture with a gaming laptop, but their battery life is somehow enough to last for the whole lecture,

The battery life of a gaming laptop varies depending on components and the like, worse on bench test is the Lenovo legion 9 at 40 minutes
the best is probably the Asus ROG G16 at around 133 minutes

 

[johntyc10]

I see, thank you guys for helping!