The heat issue is mitigated somewhat by putting the machine on some kind of stand to have air pass underneath it. That being said, even under Windows the machine went to sleep just fine, also woke up again. If anything, that works better now under Linux.
I used mostly powertop but this is less reliable source of information when you are running discrete graphics card.
It's basically a T440s without the touchpad. But it's got an i7, of that matters.
What I saw in powertop was that it never got into the better "package" power states. The cores could all be spending 90%+ of the time in C7 but the package as a whole was in C2 or worse. I never found a way to fix this.
Mine had the NVIDIA GPU as well as Intel iGPU, and I primarily used it with the iGPU. The NVIDIA was of the sort that was not connected to a physical output, so it supposedly could be powered down when not being used. I had no way to truly verify this, of course.
I don't get into the bios very often so I might be wrong, but I don't recall seeing any indication of an nvidia gpu in mine. I'll look better!
> That laptop runs super cool once I debugged all the sources of power usage.
I have a T440 which runs quite hot, where did you look for sources of power usage (beyond powertop) ?