Switch UEFI power settings without entering boot options

Question

I have a Dell Precision 7920 Tower, I need to make this computer not consume a lot of power when I am not going to use all of the combined computing power that it has. I want to save on my electric bill and I need to optimize the power usage of my tower. I know that you can disable and enable Hyperthreading, Turbo Speeds, which GPU's are enabled and all but having to change these settings manually is really time consuming. I wanted to know if there is a way to quickly change boot options from a template file like a .json or .yaml file or if there are any ways to load custom user settings from OS without the need to spam F2 before boot.

Answer 1

There is a lot of motivation to make systems as efficient as possible by default. While a high-powered workstation like Dell's Precision line tend to prioritize power over efficiency, the built-in power management functions, both in hardware and software, will already be better optimized than you could improve by manually adjusting things.

Consider this: You disabling hyperthreading may decrease the load on the CPU, but each process will have to wait its turn on the CPU rather than being able to be slotted in more efficiently, so your computer will need longer to run any give set of processes, offsetting any benefit you may have gained.

The correct thing to do in order to optimize efficiency is to:

• Use Sleep or other supported low-power states
• Monitor and control processes that start with the computer/OS
• Allow any processes to complete as quickly and efficiently as possible
• Keep drivers and firmware and the OS as updated as possible

Answer 2

To directly answer your question, no, you cannot make the changes that you want via the Advanced Configuration Power Interface (ACPI), which is your OS's means to access firmware power settings at runtime. Disabling things like turbo and hyperthreading are changes that have to occur before boot. ACPI can do things like control sleep states and processor performance characteristics like frequency scaling, but won't actually let you change the CPU's non-runtime features.