I bought a laptop with an RTX 5060 in it a year ago. It has been, until recently, completely unremarkable — no weird crashes, no thermal bullshit, no gremlins. A full year of just fucking working. Then I put Omarchy on it, and in under a week I owned a laptop with half an RTX 5060 in it, and didn’t know.

Here’s the thing about a hobbled GPU: it doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t throw an error. It just quietly does less work than it’s capable of, while you sit there thinking “huh, this feels a bit sluggish for the hardware” and blaming everything except the actual cause, because the actual cause is invisible unless you go looking for it with a multimeter’s worth of paranoia.

The vibe was off, fast

This is the part that annoys me most in hindsight: this is a machine with a full year of clean behavior on record. Same laptop, same silicon, same everything, running perfectly fine on a previous install for twelve straight months. Then a new distro goes on, and within days something feels off. The correct instinct there is obvious — suspect the thing you just changed, not the hardware that’s been flawless for a year. I did not have this instinct on day one. I had it by about day four, after several days of increasingly irritated vague dissatisfaction.

New distro, new install, everything looking gorgeous, performance feeling… fine. Not bad. Just fine. Games ran. Renders rendered. Nothing was on fire. Which is exactly the problem with a silent performance regression — there’s no crash to point at, no log line screaming for attention, just a persistent, low-grade sense that something’s leaving performance on the table and you can’t fucking prove it. So you sit there for days quietly resenting your own laptop like an idiot, forgetting it had been perfect for a year right up until you changed the one thing you changed less than a week ago.

So I did what any reasonable person does when they can’t prove a feeling: I went and got numbers.

nvidia-smi while gaming. Power draw sitting at a suspiciously round 50 watts, pinned there like a coward. Not “50 watts because the game is light on the GPU.” Fifty watts flat, under a load that should have been begging for more.

For context: this is a laptop 5060, and 50W is roughly its baseline TGP — the floor, not the ceiling. These chips are supposed to boost well above that under load. Sitting exactly at the floor, permanently, isn’t “conservative,” it’s “someone forgot to flip a fucking switch.”

Proving it wasn’t in my head

Here’s where it stopped being a vibe and became an actual investigation, because “the GPU feels capped” is not a bug report anyone can act on, including me.

I had the same physical laptop running CachyOS not long before this, for that entire clean year. Different distro, different config, identical silicon, a full year of prior history saying this hardware has zero problems. So I had something no bug report ever gets: a perfect A/B test on the same chip.

Booted CachyOS. Same game, same settings, same everything. nvidia-smi again.

85 to 93 watts, 78 to 80°C under load. Same chip. Same cooler. Same room temperature. Nearly double the power draw, just from being a different pile of software sitting on top of it.

So it wasn’t the silicon. It wasn’t age. It wasn’t thermal throttling. It wasn’t my imagination, my expectations, or a shit game engine. It was Omarchy specifically doing something — or rather, not doing something — that CachyOS was doing right, and that this exact laptop had apparently been quietly capable of for a year without complaint.

Finding the leash

The actual culprit, once I went hunting: nvidia-powerd, a background service Nvidia ships specifically to manage Dynamic Boost — the mechanism that lets the GPU actually claim higher power states under load instead of sitting at its conservative default. CachyOS enables it automatically on install. Omarchy just… doesn’t. No warning, no prompt, no “hey, you might want this.” It simply isn’t part of the install, so the GPU spends its entire life politely capped at whatever the silicon defaults to out of the box, and nobody bothers to tell you.

I didn’t want to believe a missing background daemon was really the whole fucking story, so I did the only thing that would actually settle it: I broke the working install on purpose. Masked nvidia-powerd on CachyOS, the one that had been running fine for a year.

Power draw dropped to exactly 50 watts. Same number, same ceiling, same everything as Omarchy.

Then I went back to Omarchy and forced the daemon on by hand.

100 watts. Unlocked, on command, on the exact install that had spent less than a week quietly ripping me off while I sat there blaming a laptop that had done nothing wrong for a year.

That’s as close to a controlled experiment as you get outside an actual lab: flip one service off, lose the performance. Flip it on, get it back. Do it in both directions, on both distros, and watch the number move exactly where you told it to. At that point it’s not a theory anymore, it’s just a fact you’ve now personally reproduced four times.

The compounding bug that made it so much worse

While I was in there, I found a second, completely unrelated problem stacked right on top, because apparently the universe wanted this diagnosis to be as fucking annoying as possible.

My external monitor does 165Hz. Omarchy had it running at 60Hz. Not because of the wattage nonsense — because its config picks whatever refresh rate the monitor advertises first in its own list, rather than the highest one available, and apparently this monitor’s firmware lists 60Hz before 165Hz for reasons known only to whoever wrote its EDID data at 2am on a Friday and never thought about it again.

So for a good chunk of that week I was troubleshooting “why does everything feel underpowered” while actually looking at two completely independent bugs at once — a genuinely underpowered GPU, and a display quietly running at over a third of its actual refresh rate. Neither one caused the other. Both made the machine feel like garbage, which was extra insulting given it had been flawless for a year before this install existed. Untangling “is this the wattage or is this the refresh rate” took longer than either fix did once I’d actually separated the two idiots living in the same house.

Filing the report

Once I had reproducible numbers in both directions, I wrote it up properly and filed it against Omarchy’s own tracker on GitHub. Exact steps to reproduce, exact wattage numbers, the masking test, all of it — not “this feels slow,” but “do X, get 50W, do Y, get 100W, here’s the log,” cross-linked to the existing discussion thread so nobody has to go hunting for context.

A bug report that says “performance seems bad” gets ignored, correctly, because it’s unfalsifiable and everyone who’s ever run a helpdesk has learned to tune it the fuck out. A bug report that says “here is a lever, here is what happens when you pull it, twice, in both directions” gets fixed, because there’s nothing left to argue with.

The actual takeaway

Modern hardware doesn’t fail loud anymore. It fails by quietly doing less than it’s capable of and daring you to notice, and it can do it in under a week flat if you let it. When a machine that’s been rock solid for a year suddenly feels off right after you changed exactly one thing, trust that math immediately. Don’t spend four days doubting a laptop that’s earned better than that.

Check anyway. Pull the lever. Watch the number move.