Tuesday, October 18th 2022
Intel Outs Workaround for High Arc A770 Idle Power: Force PCIe L1 ASPM in Motherboard BIOS
Intel Arc A770 "Alchemist" graphics card has an idle power-draw problem. It pulls 44 W (card-only) power when idling. This used to be acceptable some 15 years ago, but GPU idle power-draw has come a long way since. The reigning Goliath GeForce RTX 4090 pulls just 21 W when idling, and the RTX 3070, the card the A770 was extensively compared against, only pulls 9 W—that's 7 LED downlights worth power-difference between the A770 and RTX 3070. Intel has a workaround to this problem: enable the PCI-Express active state power management (ASPM) setting to L1 mode in your motherboard's UEFI BIOS setup program.
The Intel Xe-HPG "Alchemist" graphics architecture reportedly uses PCIe Gen 2-era L0 and L1 ASPM, which needs to be forced via software settings. To do this, find the PCIe ASPM settings in your BIOS setup, and enable them with the "L1" setting. You then make your way to Power Options in the Windows Control Panel, edit your active power scheme, and manually set the PCI-Express "Link state power-management" to "Maximum." This affects the power-management behavior and performance of all PCIe devices in your system, including NVMe SSDs, not just the graphics card. Intel did not put out its power-draw numbers for this workaround, but we intend to test it as soon as we can.
Sources:
Intel, VideoCardz
The Intel Xe-HPG "Alchemist" graphics architecture reportedly uses PCIe Gen 2-era L0 and L1 ASPM, which needs to be forced via software settings. To do this, find the PCIe ASPM settings in your BIOS setup, and enable them with the "L1" setting. You then make your way to Power Options in the Windows Control Panel, edit your active power scheme, and manually set the PCI-Express "Link state power-management" to "Maximum." This affects the power-management behavior and performance of all PCIe devices in your system, including NVMe SSDs, not just the graphics card. Intel did not put out its power-draw numbers for this workaround, but we intend to test it as soon as we can.
19 Comments on Intel Outs Workaround for High Arc A770 Idle Power: Force PCIe L1 ASPM in Motherboard BIOS
Also Gen 2? I know it has been in development hell for some time now but jeez.
Props to TPU for highlighting the fact (a lot of review sites don't bother)
For my 2080Ti, it shows "GPU power" ~3W, but there is also a "Gpu core (NVVDD) output power" which is ~5.5W
But in any case, 2080Ti seems to much better at idle power than new generation cards.
Please, someone with arc card, quickly test this workaround, to see what's what. It is indeed odd intel does not provide the workaround idle power numbers.
Source: pcisig.com/making-most-pcie%C2%AE-low-power-features How exactly? Most SSD's need 6 to 10ms to come out of L1. After that, performance is identical.
Even with your drive power saving timeout set to 1min, your main OS / game SSD will never go to sleep during usage. Exactly!
If large numbers of people actually bought the thing 250W x many graphics cards is terrible.
Also, this royally sucks for anyone with, say, an OEM system with an intel card where enabling this is not possible, much like ReBar. Intel needs to stop relying on BIOS changes to fix their cards and actually fix their GPUs instead.
No, not because I hate Intel.
Because it means a higher likelihood of grabbing one of these *cheap* before early EoL.
Give it a few years after these are out of production and Enthusiasts will probably have better drivers and firmware compiled for it, than Intel could have ever hoped for.