PC draws increased power after Windows 11 install

A

Ayoralyn

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 30, 2011
Messages
247
Greetings,

The wife and I have 2 identical PC's. She recently did a clean install from windows 10 to windows 11. Unfortunately, after she did, the PC started drawing vastly increased amounts of power. So much so, that it can easily crash the PC during games. And the games she can play, she's forced to play on low settings, even though her PC can easily handle high.

We've tried switching our PSU's around. Both our PSU's run fine on my PC, and both display the same issues on her PC. I've had the NVME drive, GPU and RAM out of her PC just to make sure everything is nice and clean, to no avail.

GPU drivers are up to date, updated BIOS, all drivers from MSI has been installed for the motherboard; chipset, wifi, lan, audio etc.

We're about to try and run a benchmark to see if we can force it to crash, and get some sort of log. Otherwise, I'm running out of ideas. Our next step is to try and reinstall Windows 11 again. The NVME drive it's being installed on, has 2 partitions, but we only deleted the one that had Windows 10 on it, and kept the other. Could that have been an issue?

Anything we can try and test before we reinstall?
 
Ehhh. Only thing I can think of is different patches/OS Builds and you have yet to modify all running processes and services to get the CPU/RAM load demand down.

Otherwise, other than the computer's being physically identical are the installed programs and APPS identical?

just Spit balling here.
 
StevenJamesBorchard said:
Ehhh. Only thing I can think of is different patches/OS Builds and you have yet to modify all running processes and services to get the CPU/RAM load demand down.

Otherwise, other than the computer's being physically identical are the installed programs and APPS identical?

just Spit balling here.
Click to expand...
I honestly haven't the foggiest what settings I might have tweaked on my PC, in regards to power. Probably not much. And if so, it's been months/years since, so I can hardly recall that now.

No, apps wise they're not identical. We have a lot of the same interests, so things like games in Steam or other game stores are similar, but she uses a different browser for instance, and other graphical related apps. But since she's been having issues, she's been trying to close as many unnecessary apps down, so almost nothing is running in the background while she plays. While I can have several apps including Chrome with I don't know, 50 tabs open running no problem.

There is however a difference in our Windows version. I'm running 24H2, and she's running the newer 25H2. We've tried a quick Google, but haven't found anyone complaining about power issues in 25H2. We're both on Home edition, if that matters.
 
Goto Settings --> System --> Power & Battery.
Look at every setting in there. Can't break anything there.
Also, check taskmgr.exe under the Details tab, check for anything using high CPU.
Windows 11 has a lot of "scheduled tasks" that do random useless things in the background. Disable anything you don't need.
 
Ayoralyn said:
Greetings,

The wife and I have 2 identical PC's. She recently did a clean install from windows 10 to windows 11. Unfortunately, after she did, the PC started drawing vastly increased amounts of power. So much so, that it can easily crash the PC during games. And the games she can play, she's forced to play on low settings, even though her PC can easily handle high.

We've tried switching our PSU's around. Both our PSU's run fine on my PC, and both display the same issues on her PC. I've had the NVME drive, GPU and RAM out of her PC just to make sure everything is nice and clean, to no avail.

GPU drivers are up to date, updated BIOS, all drivers from MSI has been installed for the motherboard; chipset, wifi, lan, audio etc.

We're about to try and run a benchmark to see if we can force it to crash, and get some sort of log. Otherwise, I'm running out of ideas. Our next step is to try and reinstall Windows 11 again. The NVME drive it's being installed on, has 2 partitions, but we only deleted the one that had Windows 10 on it, and kept the other. Could that have been an issue?

Anything we can try and test before we reinstall?
Click to expand...
its most likely the initial drive indexing. just let it go and and it should settle down after a while. or turn it off...
 
I'm almost certain it's one of the idiotic "green computing" functions not powering down some component properly when not in use.

djstarfox said:
Goto Settings --> System --> Power & Battery.
Look at every setting in there. Can't break anything there.
Also, check taskmgr.exe under the Details tab, check for anything using high CPU.
Windows 11 has a lot of "scheduled tasks" that do random useless things in the background. Disable anything you don't need.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I'd say go there, and make sure all the "easy" and "advanced" "features" match on both machines.
 
Is she seeing any unusual loads like unexplained high CPU or GPU load in task manager? Is the CPU or GPU running hotter than yours? I gotta figure the first thing to find out is what's using the extra power. GPU? Proc? Something else? All of the above?

What hardware is she running? Proc, GPU, etc.?

This is likely to happen to my dad at some point if he doesn't upgrade before then. He's running a "65W" i7-10700, but his mainboard defaults to power limits disabled and he doesn't have the CPU cooling for a 250W proc. Reset or update BIOS and boom, 250W proc & thermal throttling.
 
Thanks for your answers, everyone. We fiddled around with a LOT of various settings. Turns out, the only difference was that her monitor runs at 144 fps, and mine runs at 60. We tried limiting hers to 60, and we got more or less identical numbers. I imagine something is worse optimized in Windows 11, or it just naturally draws more power than Windows 10, therefore never being an issue until now. We'll look into either limiting her FPS over all, or if she or her monitor can't handle it, we'll have to upgrade to a better PSU.

She's running a 3070 TI at the moment, and I'm thinking 750-850w, whatever is best bang for your buck in that range.
 
oh, yeah that makes sense. higher refresh makes your gpu use more power, so does running a multi-screen setup. why do you think you need a bigger psu though? that wont change that.
 
pendragon1 said:
oh, yeah that makes sense. higher refresh makes your gpu use more power, so does running a multi-screen setup. why do you think you need a bigger psu though? that wont change that.
Click to expand...

I imagined her PC crashes due to power issues. We can see that when she plays games, it draws close to 100% power, if she plays on the settings she wants (High quality and 144FPS). I figured a bigger PSU would fix the issue, to make sure it had enough power?
 
Ayoralyn said:
Thanks for your answers, everyone. We fiddled around with a LOT of various settings. Turns out, the only difference was that her monitor runs at 144 fps, and mine runs at 60. We tried limiting hers to 60, and we got more or less identical numbers. I imagine something is worse optimized in Windows 11, or it just naturally draws more power than Windows 10, therefore never being an issue until now. We'll look into either limiting her FPS over all, or if she or her monitor can't handle it, we'll have to upgrade to a better PSU.

She's running a 3070 TI at the moment, and I'm thinking 750-850w, whatever is best bang for your buck in that range.
Click to expand...


Oh wow, are these physically the same monitors??

If they are and you still have not found a solution there are sometimes options in the built in menu's ( buttons on monitor itself) and if not that refer to screen Manufacture Manual or their website.

also wth is 144 FPS? That's a new one for sure.
 
Ayoralyn said:
I imagined her PC crashes due to power issues. We can see that when she plays games, it draws close to 100% power, if she plays on the settings she wants (High quality and 144FPS). I figured a bigger PSU would fix the issue, to make sure it had enough power?
Click to expand...
is it turning off? what are the system specs and how old is the psu?
 
StevenJamesBorchard said:
Oh wow, are these physically the same monitors??

If they are and you still have not found a solution there are sometimes options in the built in menu's ( buttons on monitor itself) and if not that refer to screen Manufacture Manual or their website.

also wth is 144 FPS? That's a new one for sure.
Click to expand...

No, the monitors are not the same. The systems are identical other than that, besides me having an extra NVME drive compared to hers. But I didn't think that'd have any influence.

Not being an expert, I think the 144 FPS has been around for a while. That's just what MSI Afterburner was reporting that she was running on her monitor. Hers is better than mine, higher hertz, which is why it drew more power.

pendragon1 said:
is it turning off? what are the system specs and how old is the psu?
Click to expand...

Yes, it's turning off if she plays on too high settings in games. Settings that wasn't an issue in Windows 10. I don't know how much power it was drawing in Windows 10, since we never checked, as it was running just fine.

Both systems run MSI MAG Tomahawk X570 WiFi, AMD Ryzen 5 5600X CPU, GeForce RTX 3070 TI with 2x16GB Corsair Vengenge DDR4-3200. Harddrives vary a bit, but our Windows partition are on identical harddrives.
 
Ayoralyn said:
No, the monitors are not the same. The systems are identical other than that, besides me having an extra NVME drive compared to hers. But I didn't think that'd have any influence.

Not being an expert, I think the 144 FPS has been around for a while. That's just what MSI Afterburner was reporting that she was running on her monitor. Hers is better than mine, higher hertz, which is why it drew more power.



Yes, it's turning off if she plays on too high settings in games. Settings that wasn't an issue in Windows 10. I don't know how much power it was drawing in Windows 10, since we never checked, as it was running just fine.

Both systems run MSI MAG Tomahawk X570 WiFi, AMD Ryzen 5 5600X CPU, GeForce RTX 3070 TI with 2x16GB Corsair Vengenge DDR4-3200. Harddrives vary a bit, but our Windows partition are on identical harddrives.
Click to expand...
what about the current psu, what is it? since you suspect that, and that is what we are talking about, that might be a bit of needed info....
 
pendragon1 said:
what about the current psu, what is it? since you suspect that, and that is what we are talking about, that might be a bit of needed info....
Click to expand...
Right, sorry. Of course I forgot that. It's a 650W SuperNova P2 from EVGA. 80+ Platinum, from March 2021. I feel like it shouldn't really be too old or anything?
 
it should be enough and is a good one but it could be that. try lower the speeds on the gpu and see if it works that way, if so, try another psu.
 
pendragon1 said:
it should be enough and is a good one but it could be that. try lower the speeds on the gpu and see if it works that way, if so, try another psu.
Click to expand...

Would that be done in like Nvidia Control panel or BIOS or something?
 
Ayoralyn said:
Would that be done in like Nvidia Control panel or BIOS or something?
Click to expand...
yeah maybe, or afterburner, even setting a oddly low fps limit should take enough load off to see if its the psu tripping some sort of protection. this became a bigger issue with 3/4/5000 nv and 7000/9000 amd cards, they can spike beyond the psus protections circuits and trip them.
 
Ayoralyn said:
Would that be done in like Nvidia Control panel or BIOS or something?
Click to expand...
Always worth a shot of looking and searching it up, since your continuing to investigate it could be there.

Especially if owners manual of the Monitor and Manufacture's site is not helping.
 
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