R3 slooooow on battery

The m17x draws massive amounts of power, until we have micro nuclear reactors you can plug into it don't expect ANY desktop replacement to run at 100% performance without its umbilical. and If you find one that does, good luck getting past a game's loading screen before your battery dies.

 

I can confirm the down-clocking on battery as well with my new R3 playing wow.

Tried changing power profiles, setting NVIDIA power management mode to maximum performance instead of adaptive, CPU to 100% on battery etc.... nada.

Whatever you do, don't cancel your order... it would be foolish to do that over something like this. It really is an awesome laptop... and most of your real gaming will take place plugged in anyway.

 

I second not canceling your order. You wont find a laptop with lots of raw power AND have outstanding battery performance at the same time. Not to mention cool looks.

 

Okay. For those who are worried about gaming on battery, what the heck games are you playing exactly? I've played Dolphin and PCSX2 on battery with the dGPU on, and most games run fine (not max fps, but for the most part playable). And like most ppl said: the dGPU (6970) sucks out a lot of power.

 

The reason this happens is pretty simple, the battery is unable to provide the current needed to run the machine at full power, have a feel at the power brick after 10 mins of full throrttle, it gets so hot that you can hardly touch it, batteries actually become dangerous when stressed to their maximum, the can quite literally explode or catch fire, I can just see the lawsuits now - man sets aircraft on fire with Dell laptop -

you would need a bank of batteries the size half the size of the laptop and 3x the weight the get anywhere near safe levels of power from battery, most aircraft I fly on have power outlets available at each seat but even then I can imagine 30-40 passengers with gameing laptops all plugged in drawing huge amounts of power that would most likely overload the delivery system on an aircraft, I think it would likely shut down, 230w x30 is 6.9kw

 

"LAN party on major airline causes emergency landing."

 

I totally agree with this, its completely unacceptable for the laptop not to be able to run at a decent power on battery. With my laptop in my sig, I can game for 2 hours straight on battery playing any game out, especially call of duty:Black ops or aion mmorpg or warcraft or crysis 2 just like I was using it out of the socket with no difference at all. I even hooked it up to a 42 inch sony bravio and I still could game for an hour and half with both screens running maxed out performance with no noticeable difference in performance. Grantid my laptop is only 14 inch laptop with non mxm gpu, and people have to take that into consideration, buying an mxm laptop that has a big dedicated graphics card is going to lessen battery life.

I think this goes back to my opinions on how gaming laptops are being marketed to everyone and there dogs. Not everyone is going to be able to use gaming laptops as much as a few, really there only ment for a very niche market yet there bought in masses and this type of stuff ends up happening and people like me end up needing to explain why.

After I write tho, the m17x is a powerfull laptop and gaming on battery just isnt going to give the type of results that may be expected by some people. I think i guess people need to think about 13-14 inch laptops if there going to want to see any results off of battery more so then the person I quoted as being justified.

 

yes but you do not have an extremely powerful laptop looking at your signature, not trying to down shift what you have with respect but when you go that few extra steps then we are into big power usage with cpu's and gpu's, if you look at top end desktop machines they are fitted with 500w power supplies, this thread is about high end laptops which quite frankly are closer to desktops when it comes to power requirements, we make choices and within the bounds of those choses are practical limits, if you want a powerful laptop to run on battery at full performance then your battery will be larger than the laptop, that is the simple truth.

and as an addition - I couldn't really make any sense from your sig whatsoever, could be me just being old lol

 

I just found out my GF's $290 walmart-special-emachine laptop (2.2ghz dual core with a $h1ty IGP graphics chip) can run wow at 11 fps unplugged with the same settings as my m17x, which runs a mere 4fps faster unplugged.

This is pretty sad really.

I know power draw is an issue with these electron hungry gpus, but I think Alienware (or nvidia) are being a bit too cautious/conservative with their performance settings on battery. I think these rigs could be pushed a bit more without hurting anything...

 

well no not really, slip the dell battery into that low powered almost pda level device and you might get a whole day out of it lol, it's a bit like putting a gallon of fuel in a 50cc motorbike and it does 50mph for 5hrs then that same gallon in a humvy at 50mph lasts 5 mins but you still got 50mph out of both, seriously guys not much more to talk about here - it is how it is :SLEEP:

 

Uhh....? Am I the only one who finds this ridiculous? I mean seriously, can't you hold off gaming on your laptop for like an hour or so? Telling your M17x to run its gpu off a battery is expecting your body to hold up exercising for 24 hours continuous without food. You're going to kill its battery, so the system is right in limiting the gpu power draw. IMO, leave the laptop in the bag, bust out your phone and watch a movie or play some casual games.

 

Agreed! You are wise.

Yep. Or, watch a movie on the lappy. It'll last several hours doing that. iGPU.

Somebody close this thread. It has reached a level of ridiculousness that shouldn't be surpassed by anyone.

 

If the battery is not up to it, then the solution is simple.
Mod the vBIOS clocks up ~20% and the memory clocks ~25%

Stock max battery clocks = 400 core / 900 memory

Mod the vBIOS to run the GPU clocks at 450 - 500MHz on battery, yep you will still be at 1.0v, but thats ok, the current draw will go up but only slightly, and you will get a boost without much battery drain.

Mod the VBIOS to run the memory at 1000 - 1150MHz. Here the current draw will almost be nothing at all compared with the other hardware. A good gain could be had from here with virtually no noticable battery drain.

 

This is a good solution. If only he shared instructions on how to do so

 

Even if the core cannot be moved by much, the memory can, and will not affect the battery load in any excessive nature.

I will share, but first I need to test my work, therefore I will make myself the tester. I have a vBIOS ready to do so, then I can give results, and suggest safe limits.
I asked in a couple of threads, "what tool actually works for flashing the vBIOS successfully with the 6970M in particular before I proceed?".

 

Ah, that's good to hear. Keep in touch Hopefully you'll discover something in the next day, so I can test it on my beater or the replacement machine.

 

Hi guys,

We are discussing the same thing on the msi subforum. In my case I'm using an msi gt683 with a gxt560m and have the same problem like you.

I find ridiculous for a gaming laptop not being able to play for at least a short period of time at full speed.

Maybe you can take a look here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/msi/592526-gt683-extremmely-low-fps-while-battery.html#post7680810

Moreover I have uploaded some screenshots of my clock frecuencies while on battery and when plugged in.

 

The 460M does not have the possibility to be volt modded unfortunately. They hold the voltages and clocks somewhere in the GPU and not in the BIOS, unfortunately.

 

you'll get pretty much the same effect on all current highend gaming laptops by all brands (sager, asus, MSI...etc). My G73jw drops in performance when unplugged, this is normal.

 

Since this thread has been bumped, I guess I should chime in.

While on battery, yes our lappies suck. However, you may be happy to hear that PCSX2 runs at fullspeed on either the IGP or the GPU, and on either powersaver or high perf mode. Unfortunately can't say the same for Dolphin though. It runs at 30-40fps on GPU, and doesn't run on IGP even if you were plugged in. Real PC games, I haven't tried while on battery.