Even when your PC is doing nothing, it’s still using more power than you might think. Idle draw contributes to higher temperatures, louder fans, and unnecessary strain on your components. In an effort to mitigate this, I made these 4 small tweaks to my system that decreased idle power draw, and reduced overall system temperatures.

Undervolting CPU

As long as it's stable, you can reduce power draw significantly

While undervolting has taken on more of a "performance enhancing" role in the last couple of years, it still does what it says on the tin: reduce power usage. Undervolting a CPU lowers the operating voltage of a CPU with the goal of maintaining stability and reliability in performance. The increased clock speeds you see as a result of this is more of a knock-on effect.

Less voltage running through the CPU also means less heat being produced as a result. Even the smallest of undervolts can result in temperature drops of multiple degrees. For AMD CPUs, you can undervolt using Ryzen Master's Curve Optimizer and slowly bring down the curve with intervals of -5 for all cores. For Intel CPUs, use an offset with similar, small steps, -0.05 V at a time.

In my case, I managed to get my Ryzen 7 7800X3D down to about -20 before I started seeing some instability. In terms of idle temperatures, I didn't see much of an improvement, but that was to be expected, as I have set my fan curves to be at a very low RPM at idle intentionally, in order to reduce noise.

Optimizing GPU power settings

One of the most power hungry parts of your PC

Your system's graphics card sucks down more power than anything else in your system under load, but even at idle, there's a good chance it's using a good bit of juice. When set to "maximum performance" or similar modes in your graphics driver settings, your GPU will hold its clocks higher at idle to mitigate any kind of drop that might happen while a game or other demanding software is open. Changing this behavior is easy, and can be done by swapping from these max performance profiles to "Adaptive" in the case of Nvidia GPUs. For AMD GPUs, there are no direct power-related toggles for this; their new RX 9000 series GPUs automatically drop their clocks when they're not needed, and this behavior isn't configurable.

Another easy win for GPU power savings is enabling any kind of variable refresh rate or adaptive sync tech available to you. This can be done by enabling FreeSync or GSYNC in your driver settings, then turning on variable refresh rate in Windows.

You can take power savings a step further by undervolting your GPU. Just like your CPU, your GPU can not only reap the same clock speed benefits through undervolting, but also decrease temps significantly. Idle temperatures might not change very much, because most GPUs won't spin their fans up until they reach a certain temperature threshold anyway, but it'll certainly assist in making sure your GPU sips on power at idle.

Optimizing fan and pump curves

Cooling takes power, too

When left at their defaults, case fans and CPU cooling will likely be set up in a far more aggressive manner than it otherwise needs to be. Just like the other components in your system, your cooling also draws power, and it's not insignificant; the higher your pump and fan speeds are set, the more power they'll need to maintain those speeds. In your system's BIOS you can set custom fan curves for your system fans and AIO pump, if applicable. At idle, your computer should be pretty quiet, and lower speeds mean less power drawn.

Clean up background processes

The less you have running, the less power draw you'll need

Your PC's idle state may not be what it seems, especially if you have many applications and services set to run at boot. Take a look through your startup list in Task Manager. The less here, the better in terms of power draw. The more processes you have running at idle, the higher the chance of your CPU cores being awoken, causing clocks to boost when they otherwise don't need to. A quick audit of your background processes can go a long way in terms of lowering idle power draw.

Idle power draw can sneak up on you

As you upgrade components piece by piece or install new software to run at startup, there's a good chance your idle power draw is creeping up on you. The good news is: none of these tweaks required new hardware, and together they made my PC noticeably cooler and more efficient at idle. Whether you're thinking about your power bill, your thermals, or just having a quieter system overall, trimming idle power draw is well worth the effort.