High power usage even if closed

Hi,

As my main PC, I have a laptop, as you can see in my profile. I use it for both portable use and desktop use, and when I'm at home I connect it to a beautiful K95 Platinum keyboard.

To use all the feature, I've installed iCUE, but I noticed that since then my battery started to last far less than before.

I set iCUE to not start at boot since it's better for me to open it only when the keyboard is connected. However, a service called "Corsair.Service" starts automatically. This process uses always some CPU, between 0.2% and 0.7%.

Shouldn't be a problem, right? Wrong.

I started testing more. The first thing to know is that my system usually has a near 0% CPU usage in idle. So yes, this could make a difference.

Using a software to read sensors data (HWiNFO64) I can read the real-time power consumption of this laptop, so I started trying...

I started monitoring the power consumption, and this graph came out. As you can see, the power usage is around 15 watts.

http://i66.tinypic.com/2ykx2yg.jpg

Since I've reinstalled Windows not long ago, I know well what should be running in the background, and the only new thing since the battery drop was the installation of iCUE.

So I started killing the process and checking power consumptions again.

Without any surprise, the power consumption dropped to about 8 watts while writing this message, and as low as 4 watts in full idle, as in the graph below.

http://i64.tinypic.com/s5vlgz.png

This 11 watts difference is enormous for a laptop, and while writing this post I noticed some difference since I uninstalled iCUE (killing the process wasn't enough since it starts again automatically): first of all, my CPU temperature's dropped by 5 degrees, and the fans inside my laptop stopped running (further decreasing power consumption). Moreover, the battery estimation went from about one hour and a half with more than 30% battery to more than three our with just 22% battery left.

I first noticed the high power consumption with iCUE 3.6, but updating to the latest version (3.7.99) didn't lead to any improvement.

Of course, I won't reinstall iCUE since it kills my laptop battery, and makes it louder, at least as long as this bug won't be removed.

I think that this is a serious problem for all users, even desktop users since it means that iCUE is always doing something in the background, which does use your CPU for no reason.

If this process is there for iCUE to know when a Corsair device is plugged in is still very wrong that it uses so much CPU, since if it was event-driven (as most process you see in the background) it wouldn't use so much CPU. Instead, this makes me believe that there is something always looping... which is not good, even if it's not something malicious.

Thanks for everyone attention, I hope to be able to reinstall this beautiful software very soon - without impacting my system,

Marco

Hmmm ... that's quite interesting. I have iCue running on a laptop as well but it's never had good battery life so I've always kept it plugged in. I've not noticed increased temps but I can certainly see where you would.

What you can do, however, is this ... Exit iCue. Go to Services and located the Corsair Service. Set it to "Disabled". Start iCue. That will keep the Corsair.Service process from starting and should resolve your issue.

All of your "outside the box" peripherals will still work. You'll lost system monitoring (which is what's looping) and control of things like fans and coolers - but those aren't relevant to a laptop so that's not an issue for you.

Hmmm ... that's quite interesting. I have iCue running on a laptop as well but it's never had good battery life so I've always kept it plugged in. I've not iCUEincreased temps but I can certainly see where you would.

 

What you can do, however, is this ... Exit iCUE. Go to Services and located the Corsair Service. Set it to "Disabled". Start iCUE. That will keep the Corsair.Service process from starting and should resolve your issue.

 

All of your "outside the box" peripherals will still work. You'll lose system monitoring (which is what's looping) and control of things like fans and coolers - but those aren't relevant to a laptop so that's not an issue for you.

Thank you very much. I'll try doing this later.

Should this stop Corsair. Service from opening even when I open iCUE? What I don't want to happen is, after using the keyboard with iCUE, to find the service still open even after closing iCUE.

This would be frustrating since I often simply undock the laptop and go away, and I need my battery to last.