PowerTOP Still Worthwhile For Extending Linux Battery Life In 2018

During a 7-Zip compression benchmark, the X1 Carbon continued seeing about a half-Watt savings on average even under this load while the peak power draw was lower by about one Watt. The ASUS UX301LAA saw less savings and here the average power use was actually slightly higher while the minimum power draw achieved was lower by about 300 Milliwatts.

When running some basic OpenGL graphics tests on these Intel HD Graphics, the performance was about the same while the X1 Carbon saw about 300 Milliwatts lower power use on average and about a half-Watt savings in the peak power use. The ASUS UX301LAA saw about a 700 Milliwatt power-savings on the bottom end.

The ASUS UX301LAA Haswell laptop didn't see much of a change with its battery power consumption when under load, but during the idling periods it did see a measurable improvement. For the newer Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, its battery power usage dropped thanks to PowerTOP both during the idling phase as well as under many of the benchmarks executed. PowerTOP remains an easy way for Linux laptop users to tweak their system's power profile for trying to squeeze out slightly better power savings, assuming you don't have a particularly problematic system where some power tunables could cause adverse stability or issues when for example on suspend/resume.