Nvidia RTX 2070 Super Mobile Consuming 34 watts of Power While Suspended

Debug Report: nvidia-bug-report.log.gz (1.6 MB)

Followed Instructions Here to Set Up Dynamic Power Management: Chapter 22. PCI-Express Runtime D3 (RTD3) Power Management

Additional Information:

  • Kernel: 5.10.12-1-default
  • Linux Distro: OpenSUSE Tumbleweed
  • Nvidia Driver Version: 460.39
  • Display Environment: KDE 5.20.5 on X11

Somehow, the Kernel (from /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:01:00.0/power/runtime_status) says that the GPU is suspended, but NVSMI reports that the GPU is consuming 34 watts of power while suspended, which the battery confirms by reporting a power draw of ~50 watts. So somehow with fine tuned power management, I am using up power significantly than normal power management or 0x01 mode, which makes the GPU idle at around 6 watts.

Please check for a system bios update first.

I am already running the latest bios version from Intel.

Running nvidia-smi powers the GPU back on in order to query it, so that 34 W might just be the GPU’s temporary bootup power usage. Unfortunately, I don’t think the driver has a way of querying GPU power use while the GPU is powered off so I don’t think nvidia-smi is useful for this.

Actual power to the GPU is controlled by the system BIOS, so unfortunately I think if the kernel says the device is suspended but it’s still actually powered on, you’ll probably need to contact Intel about that.

I was able to verify that it was continuously drawing 18-30 or so watts while it was supposedly powered off (the battery reported ~50 watts of usage continuously with the CPU at idle) so I doubt it is the power on wattage. However, I will contact Intel about the BIOS issue and see if it’s a bug in the meantime.

Please check, if possible, if the power consumption while suspended also happens with the 450 driver (requires downgrading the kernel).