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X60s high power consumption

Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2009 5:24 am
by Esben
I'm not sure what's the cause of high power consumption on my system. I've measured another X60s to 5.5w with monitor off, and 7.5w with monitor on lowest brightness. The difference between the two X60s' is I've an extra 1 GB stick of RAM, a Samsung 64 GB SSD, an IDTech 55P4590 TFT display, and the latest BIOS. To minimize the effect of the different display, I've measured the power draw with the display off (-1), as well as disabling all possible components.

These are the measurements I've made by taking the absolute lowest value shown in Power Manager during ½-1 minute:

Image

Has anyone else experienced higher power draw with the latest BIOS update? And how does the measurements match up to your own X60s?

In comparison my old T42 with the display at lowest brightness uses 8.5w, even though it has a discrete GPU, 14.1" display, 7200rpm harddrive and generally is based on older technology.

It really is great taking the X60s with me, but in W7 I get only about 1.5-1.75 hours of battery life. It's barely enough for a single lesson at the university. :(

Re: X60s high power consumption

Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2009 9:48 am
by Alexiskass
Esben wrote:I'm not sure what's the cause of high power consumption on my system. I've measured another X60s to 5.5w with monitor off, and 7.5w with monitor on lowest brightness. The difference between the two X60s' is I've an extra 1 GB stick of RAM, a Samsung 64 GB SSD, an IDTech 55P4590 TFT display, and the latest BIOS. To minimize the effect of the different display, I've measured the power draw with the display off (-1), as well as disabling all possible components.

These are the measurements I've made by taking the absolute lowest value shown in Power Manager during ½-1 minute:

Image

Has anyone else experienced higher power draw with the latest BIOS update? And how does the measurements match up to your own X60s?

In comparison my old T42 with the display at lowest brightness uses 8.5w, even though it has a discrete GPU, 14.1" display, 7200rpm harddrive and generally is based on older technology.

It really is great taking the X60s with me, but in W7 I get only about 1.5-1.75 hours of battery life. It's barely enough for a single lesson at the university. :(
no clue.

windows 7 is beta OS. wait for the final release.

Re: X60s high power consumption

Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2009 4:21 pm
by Esben
Thanks for the answer. :)
I'm having my bag of trouble with Windows 7 and Lenovo specific power management, but I'm mostly interested in the Windows XP consumption anomalies.

Re: X60s high power consumption

Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 9:40 am
by bluesceada
Hmm, depends on which Samsung SSD you have, it might consume more power over a HDD, only the more recent SSDs save power over a HDD, the older ones even consume more than a HDD...

See there for example:
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009 ... n,723.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009 ... n,725.html

But I guess you probably have some programs running which frequently cause CPU wakeups, preventing the CPU from being in lower power ACPI states long enough.
There is no way I know of, to measure that in Windows though.. In Linux there is powertop. But of course that doesn't help to find the applications in Windows which produce too much wakeups

Maybe try booting the System in safe mode, and see if you recognize the same there.

But your battery also has to be quite down from its Design Fuel, when you get less than 2 hours at a 12W consumption?

Re: X60s high power consumption

Posted: Sun Apr 12, 2009 9:52 am
by gunston
most likely it is caused by the Graffiti effect from Win7 and
the CPU is constantly working and processing in the beta version of win7 that drag lot of power consumption