Using PowerTOP 2.6 Saves Power, Extends Battery Life On Ubuntu 14.04

First up was the new Tesseract game... Between the Linux 3.13 and 3.15 kernels we didn't see any performance changes for the Ivy Bridge graphics with this demanding game. PowerTOP also had no changes on performance when tuning the system for maximum battery life.

Ubuntu 14.04 out-of-the-box on the ASUS Zenbook Prime yielded an average power usage of 25.4 Watts, but when applying all of the PowerTOP 2.6 tunables, the power usage when running this Linux game dropped to 22.6 Watts. When using the Linux 3.15 kernel on Ubuntu Trusty, the average power usage was 24.3 Watts and it dropped to 21.7 Watts with the PowerTOP power saving optimizations. The peak and low readings of the power use had also dropped with the PowerTOP suggestions.

The Xonotic results saw similar advantages to Tesseract. There was no change in the Linux gaming performance while the power usage dropped from about 31 Watts to 28 Watts, a power-savings of about 10%.