AMD Battery life? How's yours?

[grmela]

Hi there,
I've recently bought the AMD L325 version of ThinkPad Edge 13. It looks like a great machine but I'm a bit concerned about the battery life. I'm currently getting about 2:15-2:45 of light web browsing/document editing with WiFi and Bluetooth enabled, backlight at level 4 and "Maximum runtime mode" power setting. (In Ubuntu Karmic, the battery life under the same conditions is just under 2 hours without any special configuration)

How much battery life are you getting from your AMD-based Edge (with 4-cell battery)?

[Colonel O'Neill]

Although I may not have an Edge, my AMD MV-40 in the X100e has really really really terrible battery life.

On the X100e 6-cell, I get approximately 3.5-4 hours. This is almost the same as my T400 on 6-cell, which gets approximately 3-3.5 hours.

So extrapolating the average 3.75 hours on 6 cell to 4 cell, I get 2.5 hours.
Really leaves A LOT to be desired, especially when I see the Asus UL-series pulling 9-10 hours.

(X100e = MV-40, T400 = P8700. Both have been undervolted to their lowest stable voltages.)

[ThinkRob]

Yep.

Six years ago I wouldn't have guessed that Intel's chips would be the efficiency kings of the x86 world, but... well... What can I say? They got their act together and AMD lost their lead.

[jvarszegi]

On my X100e with a 6-cell battery, I get 5+ hours doing web browsing and office work. But that's with an SSD and efficient power settings.

[fooyc]

I don't own an Edge. But my suggestion is,
a) experiment more with disabling some unused ports and devices.
b) Find out which PID that is high I/O and processing, see if you really need them.
c) Create or modify, power plan. Toy around with some options in there. Power manager is quite a good tool.

[Colonel O'Neill]

I have a spinning drive, which probably explains it. I can't sem to figure out if it's 5400 or 7200... Although comparing the noise of it to the known 5400 in my T400... I'd say it's either a 7200 or a very loud 5400.

[jvarszegi]

I have a spinning drive, which probably explains it. I can't sem to figure out if it's 5400 or 7200... Although comparing the noise of it to the known 5400 in my T400... I'd say it's either a 7200 or a very loud 5400.

It's probably a combination of the drive and differences in how we use Windows. The SSD should be responsible for a half hour or so of extra battery life at maximum, in my estimation.

I don't use Aero Glass, preferring the Windows Classic look and feel (even have my start menu set up to work like Windows 95). That means the graphics card doesn't get a workout during my general use. I did a clean install of Windows, and don't have a lot of processes running at once. I disabled unnecessary hardware, e.g. the camera. I also would bet we have different power management settings.

Your drive is a 5400 RPM one, unless you've changed it. The spindle speed doesn't necessarily have much to say about the total power efficiency for serving a certain amount of data, as I understand it, but in the old days 5400 RPM drives were more efficient during peak load.

[Colonel O'Neill]

Turning aero off should relieve some of the demand on the GPU. It seemed to get me about 15 more minutes on the estimated battery time.

Does disabling hardware (is it in Device Manager or under the security tab of BIOS) actually cause a reduction in power consumption?

It just sucks that the AMD chip has such a high consumption and heat output; my X100e overheated and shutdown after playing a flash game for 15 minutes. Grr. )

[jvarszegi]

Yoicks, that's terrible. What sort of game was it? I will try playing it and see how hot mine gets after a few minutes (although I will probably quit before I get to 15!). I haven't played any flash games on mine, but my four-year-old plays one called Meeblings, and I noticed it seemed warmer underneath after half an hour of that. That was what tipped me off that the graphics card might be responsible for extra heat and maybe also for power drain.

[Colonel O'Neill]

Heh... I was playing Last Stand 2, which is fairly intensive as flash games go; it lagged occasionally.
Potentially another cause was that I was using TPFanControl, which only reads aps temperatures, and therefore doesn't bring up the fan speed if the CPU temps go up.