Getting the Most out of your Alienware 14 Battery Life

Hello,

I wanted to get people's opinions on optimal settings for your alienware 14 to get it to last those long hours at work or school .

Here are my options and preferences, if anyone can suggest others I'd appreciate it, or post your own

1. Set the Power mode to Power Saving
2. I limited the CPU Usage on battery to 50%
3. I left wifi power to maximum because I do not want to lose internet connectivity.
4. Closed any background applications (Skype, adobe, etc)
5. Shut down the lights
6. My screen is dimed to 1 level above minimum.
7. Nvidia Control panel is set to auto-select ( I think setting it to intel might increase battery, but I think leaving it to auto balances out.)

So far 89% left, already used for 30 mins. 4H 42 mins left. Light browsing and typing at the moment, steam and antivirus running in background.

Honestly the only reason I'm regretting the alienware 14 compared to the Razer Blade 14" is the battery life (although the edge has a terrible poor quality screen). I think we get nearly half the battery life for nearly the same specs

 

Setting it to run the on the Intel card could help.

 

Same specs, but a much much heavier and chunkier system. I would Def go for the razer

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Runs cooler though...

 

+1

Switching to integrated graphics should get you 6 hours, easy.

 

Even with forcing the Intel card I struggle to get more than 3.5 hours of battery life. It's good enough for what I need and I carry my AW 14 in a backpack so it's easy to bring the charger along.

 

Really? The AW 17 gets 3-4 hours on dedicated graphics and up to 7 hours on integrated. That AW 14 has a weak battery.

 

The 14 has a 69wHr battery and the 17 has an 86wHr battery, they should be much closer on run time. I've been sitting down doing a powerpoint and web browsing at 1/3 brightness for the past hour and a half and am at 51% battery.

If you guys can get 7 hours on the 17 the 14 should get about 5.5 hours. If anybody has figured out how to get more than the 3.5 hours for the 14 I'm all ears. I wouldn't mind a decent increase in battery life.

 

It won't get 7 hours running programs. I've seen 6 hours with Netflix. It gets 4 hours with regular use running dedicated graphics. The AW 14 should be better than 3.5 hours on integrated graphics.

 

Wow, I was really hoping for more life than that. Did you ever make any headway in getting more out of it?

 

I honestly am getting pretty good battery about 5 hours using it at school, but I would rather do the razer's battery at this point. Sometimes it can be even 3-4 hours, if I have brightness set higher...and tbh the screen brightness is a tad low already...and I hate lowering it.

In terms of Razer vs Alienware, the only problem is that the Razer has a terrible display (actually one of the worst ones on the market, and it's actually 10-15% weaker, it uses the lower powered cpu and the gpu clocks are lower (and I think OC potential is almost 0). BUT it might be worth it for almost double the battery.

The only thing I wish this laptop had (and I wouldn't mind the weight as much) is a much better battery to justify the weight. I was honestly expecting about 8-10 hours out of something this heavy easily.

Most of the reasons why it's like this is because they sacrifice battery to use the available space for heating, but I think the could have definitely put in a much better battery anyways. I wonder if they have any others on the internet that you can buy that has double the cells or something .

I'm still very happy with the computer as a gaming device though, I have it currently O/C to 1050 MHz stable and +350mhz memory Runs everything maxed at 1366x768 even BF4 60 fps (obvious dips during heavy action though, but still stays above 40)

 

Not really. Sitting idle, it'll sometimes say 4 hours remaining or a little more, but once I start using it, 3 to 3.5 hours is the effective limit. I could turn down the screen brightness and force it to underclock a bunch while on battery to squeeze more battery out of it, but I'm not willing to cripple performance for battery life. I can run most of my game collection at 1080P/ultra while I'm away from my desk, so that makes up for the mediocre battery life.

 

I wonder, just out of curiosity if you did everything possible to conserve power, what you would get? The times you are getting wouldn't allow me to travel with this system unfortunately.

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