Hey so I'm trying to improve the efficiency of my server, which seems to be a bigger hassle than i expected (especially when running zen 4...).
My setup is the following:

R9 7900X
RTX 3070 TI
Gigabyte B650I
96GB Crucial 6000
x2 Seagate Exos 16TB
x3 mixed NVMe ssds
x1 Sata Samsung QVO Sata SSD
Corsair SF850L

So I've been trying to follow the unraid guide for power efficiency and taking out ASPM conflicting parts and being limited to only seeing C-state 1-3 hasn't made things easy, but now I'm looking at how to pin my cores most efficiently to maximise the amount of core parking and time in lower C-states.

I wasn't seeing the kind of behaviour I was expecting when disabling cores so I tried isolating unraid to only utilise core 0 (for testing, i know this isn't much).
Then I pinned my VMs (HA and Volumio) and Dockers (around 15) to core 1-3 and left the remaining cores pinned to my gaming VM.

The result I expected from this was that my 8 cores would be going to lower C-states and remain there, but i'm intermittently seeing 1% usage on those cores, preventing them from going lower than C3 most of the time:
 

As seen most. of the cores are ~90% of the time in C3, and only ~10% of the time in lower C-states, even though they're not running any processes.
When I tried to search for answers the only thing i really found was people being confused about the difference between isolation and pinning so I was hoping someone knew if this is expected behaviour or something out of the ordinary?

Good monday to everyone

Additional findings:
It seems like when the GUI for either one of my services or terminals and especially the one for unraid itself is open it triggers activity on my pinned cores, causing a jump back to C3 for the majority of my isolated cores.
It's usually able to go down to C1-2: 0% and C3: ~40%
So it's mostly sitting at lower C-states, as long as I don't interact with my services or unraid AT ALL.

I'm still curious why these tasks would cause load on the cores and why it's so fragile - I can't know if they're reaching lower C-states if i can't check it, but i can't check it cause then they will jump back up to C3...