Too much power consumption

[archvile]

I have an accessory installed on my case that show current power draw. It shows around 180 watts in idle in Mountain Lion, where it shows 140 watts in idle in Windows 7. I can't figure out what might be causing this. The CPU usage is around 1% in idle in both operating systems, also there's not any other drive activity or anything. Hardware-wise the only difference between Windows 7 and Mountain Lion is that Windows 7 is running on a regular 320gb hdd, while Mountain Lion is running on a 128gb SSD, which should be consuming maximum of 3 watts or something under load.

Any ideas?

 

[joncas]

Hello,

I have the same symptom: 32 Watt idle in Windows vs 40 W idle in Mountain Lion.
It must have to do with Windows doing a better job of handling the cpu's power saving features.

(I have a much lower power consumption than you do with an ivy bridge i5-3570K on a Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD3H using only the integrated HD4000 video. The ivy bridge uses a 22nm process, and power diminishes with size ...)
In comparison, my old MacPro1,1 uses 190 W idle and has less than half the geekbench score!

 

[nukedukem]

It's probably your graphics card running at a higher power state in OSX. Tweak AGPM kext to lower your GPU clock speed during slow/idle use.

 

[joncas]

It's probably your graphics card running at a higher power state in OSX. Tweak AGPM kext to lower your GPU clock speed during slow/idle use.

Hi Nukedukem,

Could you elaborate on how to accomplish this? The exact name of the kext, and what to edit within it? (I'm using only the internal HD4000, no external graphics card).

Many thanks!