I noticed that the default CPU frequency governor behavior causes unnecessary power consumption and noise during light workloads. With the powersave governor, my CPU stays locked at 2.2GHz even when running at 100% load, so it never scales up when needed. The performance governor pins the CPU to 4GHz even at 3% utilization, leading to excessive power draw, high temperatures, and loud fan noise when browsing the web. I also found that ondemand and schedutil governors behave nearly identical to the performance governor on my hardware, with no meaningful dynamic scaling for light tasks. CachyOS’s gamemode does not fix this either, and does not adjust governors for general desktop use.
I wrote a small script as a proof of concept to try to address this issue, though it still needs further development. You can find the code here: