7730/7530 Battery life with only integrated graphics

Thanks, @SvenC. Am I correct in saying that most of the time your slider is kept towards 'better performance', which gives you about 6 hours? Is it guaranteed that the slider at position 2 gives you better battery life? Thanks so much.

 

Yes, most of the time at "better performance". Just reading and typing a bit in the mode shows 6hrs 19min at 94% - display brightness at 40%.

I tested again and on position 2 I had not much of a change after a few minutes. I closed unused apps (Outlook, three Visual Studios, VS Code, Event Viewer) and went down to 30% brightness. Typed and read a bit in Chrome and now I am on 8hrs 35min 89%. So usage and running apps, maybe connected devices (I have just a currently unused SD card and an ANT+ dongle plugged) influence the battery time as well.

I switched to "battery saver" which brought me down to 6hrs 9min 89% - seems hard work to switch modes ;-)
After 3 minutes I am back at 9hrs 38min 88% with battery saver.

Switched to position 2, again 6hrs 9min 87%.
Read a bit about the TPM update fun in the 7530/7730 owners thread and now I am at 9hrs 13min 86%.

Hmm, just switched browser tabs, opened another page in a new tab, typed a bit, used the touchpad, now I am on 4hrs 28min 85%.
Waited a bit 7hrs 0min 84%.

So with light work in slider position 1 and 2 you can get 8+ hours - but sometimes it seems hard to tell when my light work is light work for Windows 10 on 7730 as well...

Do you see similar changes in battery usage?

Hope I did not add too much confusion...

 

I use this application called BatteryBar Pro to track my battery usage. It averages use over time to give a fairly accurate 'time left' scenario. I am at 3h 33 min, 74% battery life. I do notice that you got 9-10 hours in your battery report; Windows would not report such a high battery life if it wasn't actually true. Nevertheless, you are getting more than 6 hours which is already very good.

 

Finally got to go to windows and run on battery.
Here is my battery report.

Usage: Slider set to max battery.
Screen light: set to lowest possible (4k screen).
3 firefox tabs open (two on gmail type email sites but no ads, one on youtube)
1 acroread window
1 adobe digital editions reader
Most of time, I wasnt even active on the laptop (but screen was on)

During the last hour I played a long youtube video (in a background tab - tab not visible) just to get some internet traffic, with windows system sound set to mute.

The windows battery life estimate was misleading - it was around 5.5-6 hours most of the time, but battery ran down inside 4.5 hours (system went to standby)

Surprisingly bad battery life.

Let me know if you or the Dell engineers need more info.

 

@Ionising_Radiation did you follow up on this issue? Do you happen to know if the 7740 or the HP Zbook 17 G6 suffers from the same issue?

 

I did, but the Dell rep chalked it down to the battery itself. I believe I mentioned the particularly strange fix where if I opened Adobe Lightroom and left it minimised, the battery life doubled? If you can't recollect that, or I missed it out, the Reddit post is here.

I forwarded my claims to Dell, but I was rather unimpressed by their conclusions, and I don't think they understood exactly what I meant.

 

Thanks for the effort
Do you happen to know if the 7740/HP Zbooks also suffer from this issue?

 

No clue. From what I've heard, the ZBook battery life is fairly impressive; as for the 7740, you might consider asking at the 7740/7540 forums.

 

I can get the 7740 (9880H + RTX 4000) down as low as 8.5W but it takes a lot of configuration and experimentation to get there. I found what worked best was setting the global settings preferred graphics processor to "Integrated Graphics" and then build a whitelist of all apps you want to allow to use the dedicated GPU.

 

Is this true idle—in other words, hands off the notebook, nothing else running in the background? If so, you should be able to reach power draw as low as 4–5 W.