Suspicious extra powerdraw? 80w unaccounted for.

[Mr Screech]

Since a few hours the powerdraw went up by a suspicious amount and I have no idea why.
Activity monitor doesn't show anything new and when I enter 'powermetrics' in the terminal I get this at the end, the numbers don't seem to add up.

ANE Power: 10492 mW
DRAM Power: 13536 mW
CPU Power: 16763 mW
GPU Power: 69481 mW
Package Power: 176756 mW

GPU + CPU is about 86w, so why is it drawing near 180w? Confirmed from UPS.

Connected peripherals: 1 thunderbolt nvme, 1 caldigit ts3 dock (with its own PSU), 10gbe, two usbc monitor(one through the dock).

I have no idea where that extra energy is coming from.
I rather not reboot since it's in the middle of something.

//

It seems GPU related, seeing the inexplicable dip here,

but why wouldn't it show the real power use.
It was running for 2 days without issue around PKG 100w.

 

[Mr Screech]

And one day later it went back to normal.

Extremely odd behavior, I must say.
I guess the NSA finished scanning...😕

 

[Zest28]

Sorry, I was mining Bitcoins. Going to pick up my new Lambo now.

 

[Mr Screech]

Oddly enough, the UPS continues to register a consistently high reading, hovering around 240 watts.

Either the power reporting system on the Mac has malfunctioned, or there's another issue at play. The only other device connected to the UPS is an 8-disk NAS, which typically shouldn't draw more than 80 watts. I'll investigate further in 3 days, and hopefully, I'll be able to uncover the root cause of this anomaly.

 

[Arctic Moose]

Maybe your fans are spinning really quickly? Not sure what 66W would accomplish, but it would be fast. 🙂

 

[Mr Screech]

After rebooting things got a little better, however something still feels off about the power reading software.

When the system is idle, the software reads the Mac at 6-7W. The UPS measures 32W, which I partly attribute to the Thunderbolt NVMe boot drive. This figure is subtracted from the NAS's power draw, so it’s not the efficiency at low power draw.

During full GPU usage, the UPS reads 170W, while the software reading shows 125W (instead of the previous 176W or 88W). Factoring in the correction from 6 to 32W, it should read 150W at the UPS. So, about 20 watts of phantom watts are added at full GPU load. It's not terrible, but I do wish the software were more accurate.

 

[ondioline]

Presumably “package power” includes things like the thunderbolt controllers, display engines, media engines, etc. These wouldn’t be reflected in the ANE/CPU/GPU metrics.

 

[Mr Screech]

Here's a new 'anomaly':

When I leave my system untouched for a few minutes, the package power moves to 300w with spikes to around 330 watts. I've verified this with my UPS.

However, as soon as I touch the keyboard or mouse, it drops down to approximately 140 watts while the UPS draw remains at 300w.

 

[galad]

Probably it's indexing photos and videos and running ML on them for spotlight.