High Power Consumption despite using CPUFriend

[sudoali]

Hi

I set plugin-type=1 and have X86PlatformPlugin in my IOReg.

I used CPUFriend and CPUFriendFriend as this guide here.

 

Now the battery lasts longer than before. But still, I get more heat and higher power consumption in Hackintosh than Windows. In windows CPU pkg uses 0.5 watts at idle, it goes up to 1 watt some times but mostly at 0.5 watts. in Hackintosh, I get 1.5 watts at idle state. it is still 3x more than windows. Hackintosh produces more heat in idle than Windows browsing with 1~2 tabs in Chrome.

 

frequency vectors I used:

800M  epp ~ 90

1.2G   epp ~ 80

1.2G.  epp ~ 40

I don't remember exact values for EPP, but these were the closest things I remember.

 

I also tried with 800M and 0xFF for the first vector, the heat was the same, 1.2~1.3 watts consumption, but the CPU never reaches higher frequencies. again, 1.2 watts is so much higher than Windows.

 

Is there anything else I could try?

Thanks in advance.

[sudoali]

Solved!

TLDR; Just turned off dGPU from BIOS instead of -wegnoegpu or any other SSDT hotpatch.

 

TSDR;

I was using -wegnoegpu to disable dGPU although there is a dedicated option in BIOS settings. I occasionally play games in windows, so I didn't want to go to BIOS settings to enable/disable dGPU in there every time I play.

 

But I gave it a try and it turns out that `-wegnoegpu` is useless if you want to completely power off dGPU. disabling discrete GPU in BIOS, reduced heat and power consumption remarkably. I streamed 20 minutes of a movie with VLC on my second monitor and battery went down 7 percent on a LAN network. using a dongle WIFI, it costs 8 percent. this would give me 4 hrs of watching movie and/or surfing(, if the battery behaves the same way in lower percentage which is unlikely).

 

Disabling dGPU using whatevergreen flags or using SSDT hot patches will only tell the OS there is no dGPU but doesn't power off that giant power consumer, I guess.(am I wrong?) It may need an ACPI call to get switched off, something like `bbswitch` in linux.

 

I think this the most I can get from a Hackintosh.

[sudoali]

1 hour ago, Hervé said:

There are ACPI calls to turn off and on the dGPU and these can be applied to as DSDT or SSDT patches. It's quite well documented on the various Hackintosh forums, though usually used when BIOS offers no facility like yours.

Thanks @Hervé, so SSDT hot patch would really power down dGPU.

Quote

The goal is quite simple. These machines provide an _OFF method, usually in an SSDT, that can be called to power down the discrete device. The easiest fix is to call _OFF from the corresponding _INI method. Note that the _OFF method may be in DSDT or may have a different name (GPOF, OPOF, _PS3, etc.)

Quote from here. I think the method I used to turn off the discrete GPU was wrong. Therefore, I have to dig into more guides. Anyway, thanks to point it out.

Edited July 21, 2020 by sudoali

[sudoali]

Thanks for your passion to help. I really appreciate that. I followed this guide here. and it seems like it is working!

At first, I used this dsdt hotpatch, and it didn't work so I used boot-arg -wegnoegpu. now using windows device manager I realized my bios path to dGPU was different.

 

- Rehabman's guide is obsolete, I guess. IMHO, Dortania has the most complete and up to date guide.

- Also, their version of .dsl file includes an 'If' statement that will only disable dGPU on macOS, not others.