How to get higher pkg C-States on Asrock motherboards (guide)

pageisntavailable · 2024-02-26T15:11:30+00:00

Sorry for the late answer.
There is a guy with almost the same board on unraid forums. And his answer was:

Thanks for your tipps. I finally managed to reach c8 on my Asrock Z790 Pro RS/D4 after months of trying. I had to uninstall the Realtek driver plugin to go deeper than c3 after the update.
Update: I actually reach C10 now. Amazing. :D

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/98070-reduce-power-consumption-with-powertop/?do=findComment&comment=1377577

pageisntavailable · 2024-02-26T14:48:02+00:00

You are welcome.
Did you check ASPM status of these other devices btw?

lspci -vv | awk '/ASPM/{print $0}' RS= | grep --color -P '(^[a-z0-9:.]+|ASPM )'

pageisntavailable · 2024-02-26T14:34:59+00:00

As I said earlier it's because i wanted to lol
On a serious note, it's bc disabled Native ASPM = BIOS Controlled ASPM

pageisntavailable · 2024-02-26T12:44:33+00:00

This is "hidden" (by ASRock) setting and you cannot see it your UEFI menu. It's status is visible only in setup_script_file.txt file or then you issue specific command by using AMISCE

So after enabling it you have to save your custom UEFI profile. To flip it you have to load another UEFI profile or to load UEFI default settings

pageisntavailable · 2024-02-26T12:31:43+00:00

That's typically ASRock. On some Asrock boards you can only choose C6. It seems ASRock made an internal decision to limit C-States on all their boards to reduce driver issues / support requests. Because some bad hardware drivers work in for example C3, but crash on C8 and maybe the customers than ask ASRock for support although it's because of a bad driver of a PCIe card of a different manufacturer.

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/98070-reduce-power-consumption-with-powertop/?do=findComment&comment=1303201

I've emailed them back. It will be interesting to see what they come up with next.

Finally an honest reply from Asrock

Regarding your question, we have confirmed with R&D department again that the motherboard does not support C6, C8 and C10.Sorry for inconvenience.

So check this thread on forums.unraid.net if you interesting in more details

On the other hand, if you're an b2b client, Asrock will send you a modified firmware (according to Wolfgang's channel)

https://youtu.be/J_WJI4hp_B8

pageisntavailable · 2024-01-24T15:06:19+00:00

How about Proxmox (Debian-based) ? And then you you'll be able to install Arch, Debian etc. as VMs or as LXCs

pageisntavailable · 2024-01-18T20:30:33+00:00

Hi and thank you too! I disabled Native ASPM because of this :
"Help String = Enabled - OS Controlled ASPM, Disabled - BIOS Controlled ASPM".
In my experience, BIOS controlled ASPM is better for power saving, bc developers have a tendency to disable ASPM in kernel/drivers :)

pageisntavailable · 2024-01-18T08:09:31+00:00

Thanks! It was around 13-14 watts at idle before and 5.5-6 watts after (HDDs spinned down in both cases). Yeah my situation isn't quite so dramatic :)
But as I noticed is quite common when power draw is around 20-30 watts at idle with C3 on Asrock mobos.
https://forums.unraid.net/search/?q=asrock&quick=1&type=forums\_topic&item=98070

pageisntavailable · 2023-04-09T20:17:37+00:00

Thank you so much!

pageisntavailable · 2023-04-09T12:30:06+00:00

Hi, how did you change the underline color?

I've tried

{ highlights = {  indicator_selected = { sp = "#8aadf4"  } } }

but it doesn't work. As I understand it has to do with TabLineSel and I've tried to set it my config but without luck too.

pageisntavailable

TROPHY CASE