Voicemeeter Banana idle cpu usage ryzen

[das1996]

With 64 different options to tweak, one can truly lose their mind messing with this!@#

So, a more systematic approach was needed. I reset all policies to default and installed the latest ryzen profiles. This adds a ryzen balanced and ryzen high performance policies in addition to windows default power saver, balanced and high performance.

Switched over to power saver and watched the ups numbers as well as ryzen master to monitor core utilization and voltages. Saw good stuff

Next, went through each line, line by line and recorded each entry and its value in a spreadsheet. Did the same for the ryzen balanced. Highlighted the differences in yellow.

After much experimentation turns out the Processor performance decrease threshold and Processor performance boost policy made significant changes to vcore and power consumption. More so the first one. Tweaked it to get back to similar vcore voltages and ups wattage I had with the power saver at idle conditions. There is improvement under steady state conditions.

However, that's not to say that VMB has no cpu usage. It does. But, I suppose that's the price to pay for ability to send signal to two different speaker devices (digital and analog) as well as EQ/cross over functions.

Results are in the attached spreadsheet.

[xcasxcursex]

Excellent work!

... So essentially what you did was try the power saver profile, and since it worked but wasn't quite there, compared with the balanced one, and then taken it a step further down? So you've made a 'super-power-saver' profile Clever method!

Does it now park all but one core when it's idle, or is it still 3 active but they're just using a more acceptable amount of power?

Well, congrats, you didn't lose your mind and now you know more about the quagmire of windows power management than most people ever will. Well done

BTW, You may want to look into using powercfg.exe to change profiles. That way you can set a shortcut to switch when you're leaving the machine to idle, or when you're using it and want it to be snappy

[das1996]

It's 2-3 cores still, but the vcore is lower, ~1.2xx V vs 1.3xx when on ryzen balanced. The UPS power consumption is not 100% accurate - power is presented in 10 watt intervals. One of these days I'll hook up a kill-a-watt meter to see how close the readings are. But, for the purpose here I already have some established baselines.

The power saver did reduce cpu performance to an extent. I used a simple winrar benchmark for comparisons. The results after the tweaking are very close to ryzen balanced. Good enough for me. I knew there'd be a price to pay with a 12 core cpu so don't want to give up performance entirely.

The powercfg profile options is an idea too. Generally the screen just goes into power saver mode. The issue is there's no event registered to use a trigger in task scheduler to perform any functions once awake. If there was, this exercise could be avoided entirely I'd just switch the profile to power saver when screen is off, then balanced once resumed. The closest i've found is a logon/logoff auditing enabled. This registers events which can then be used as triggers.

Here's an interesting utility to make making changes easier... https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/windo ... ty.416058/

[xcasxcursex]

I almost linked you to that utility I decided against it since telling people, "hey download this mysterious software and run it as admin", is generally bad advice, which one should never give, or take lol... But I'm glad it's helping you. I use a couple of that guy's tools and I'm pretty confident they're safe (wish he'd just open source them so we could be sure though!).


I think you've got the hang of this whole thing now but after I had a chance to look over your spreadsheet there was one thing I noticed which might be harming your power usage for very little performance in return: Minimum processor state. You have it set to 99%, so it will keep the clock speeds high. If you set it lower (mine's on 5% even when gaming. It comes up to 100% in that scenario and stays there because the CPU is busy) it will let the chip throttle down to lower clock speeds, but it will still be able to step back up to higher clocks at short notice. Since you've changed some other relevant settings (like increase/decrease thresholds), I can't be sure that the stepping up and staying there part will work for you.

As always, give it a test (that benchmark is a good way to go) and I can't make any promises because it's AMD-specific but.... Worth a shot. There are a couple of other things there I personally might tinker with, but I think you've got the hang of it and the entire point of a customised powerplan is that you can customise it to *your* needs, so you're on track

[das1996]

That 99% min is an amd ryzen thing. I can't recall the exact reason but it's that way for a reason.

Re utility.. Tested that in a VM, never in the main OS. Did things the hard way there.

[xcasxcursex]

Ahh yes, when I looked for that I found a bunch of posts on the AMD subreddit (told you that was the place to go ) eg:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/c ... gen_ryzen/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6 ... cpu_state/


It's all very AMD/Ryzen specific and shows a few good examples of how the advice I've given you is not appropriate for AMD chips... So yeh, Once again sorry about that. If I were you I'd definitely go and ask over there if you need more help, but you seem to have it well under control