My CPU is nuts...

[hassan.iqbal]

Hi everyone, I'm having an issue with power draw on my laptop CPU (i7-7700HQ). So I have TS installed and all my profiles are set up to my preferences, and I have some other monitoring software like HWInfo64 to tell me more about my system.

 

Much to my confusion (this laptop has a mind of its own...), at idle and either on battery or AC, the reported CPU power draw seems to lie from 15W, sometimes all the way up to 30W (again, ON IDLE). The conservative settings I've applied for the "battery"  profile on TS don't seem to be taking effect on the CPU's power draw, even if it's running 0.9GHz across all cores (and, obviously, it gets higher on my "performance" profile when its an all-core 3.4-ish GHz speed, but this isn't the main issue).

 

(On TS I've applied a fairly aggressive undervolt on the CPU (see the screenshots)).

 

The only situation I've found my laptop to behave more normally is, weirdly enough, when I'm at work in the office - only then TS reports CPU power draw between 1-5W, which is good since I can get around 2.5hrs of battery life quite easily. So it literally seems like when I'm home, something is running on my laptop that's consuming so much power all the time.

 

I've checked task manager and the Windows battery settings a bunch of times to try and find any potential power-hungry apps that may be running in the background but haven't found anything - the most power-hungry process is "system", which must be a lie. 

 

So I guess what I'm asking is: are there any ways to find out exactly what's causing this high power draw on idle? Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated!

[Cyracus]

could be windows being windows, say if your work internet connection is such that it blocks things like windows updates. Since the network connection is the only thing I can think of that would be different check what happens when you disconnect from the network

[hassan.iqbal]

3 hours ago, Cyracus said:

could be windows being windows, say if your work internet connection is such that it blocks things like windows updates. Since the network connection is the only thing I can think of that would be different check what happens when you disconnect from the network

Yeah I checked that too, I have 2 separate WiFi routers in my house (one upstairs, one downstairs). Upstairs I connect by ethernet and downstairs wirelessly, but disconnecting completely makes no difference... 

[Cyracus]

Well that's quite strange. Maybe give the local exorcist a call and see if they can make a visit.