R4 and gaming on battery (Observation)

I noticed on here as i was ordering my R4 that many people had stated that while on battery; The 7970m would not be used for gaming and that the Ivy Bridge processor takes the load while on battery. that the battery simply could not handle the mega 100w 7970m card.

I have tested this and have found this to be false.

I've booted the system on battery with switchable graphics enabled.

I launched the switchable graphics panel in the CCC and verified that Diabloiii.exe was set for high performance.

Upon entering act 3 on diablo... Afterburner showed the 7970m at 90%+ usage. I also noted an increase of heat from the GPU fan.

I relaunched D3 with power saving enabled and Afterburner showed 0% usage on the 7970m. (proving that afterburner was not tracking the Ivy GPU)

another interesting thing I discovered was that with D3 running I was able to alt+tab and change from power saving to high performance... then alt tab back in and the game dynamically changed to the 7970m on the fly.


the purpose of this post was to share my findings on testing the claim from many posts that the M17x R4 would not run its dedicated graphics card on battery.

 

well, if it's like the r3, I believe it should be greatly under clocked when its on battery. but you are still running on the dedicated card. the frames should be lower. correct?

 

You can run the discreet card while on battery, you just have to set the power settings to high performance and force it to use the discreet card even when the battery is in use. I don't believe Alienware would put a battery in their systems that couldn't handle a 100% GPU & CPU load, even if it drains it out in 60 minutes. I just wonder about the electrolyte discharge stress...IOW, draining the battery down to 0 in no time flat which can cause even dry electrolyte to expand and possibly explode. But that's just the crazy rantings of a wrench monkey

 

It'll use the 7970M of course, while on battery, but the card itself will be clocked down quite a bit.

Even after changing my power settings to max performance while on battery, it'll still be clocked down.

 

Yeah the other day playing DOW2: chaos rising my plug fell out and I didn't even notice for an entire round of last stand... It can game on battery. I don't think for very long however. I lasted about 30 min and had ~50% juice remaining.

 

with all power saving turned off, I get a noticeable drop in frame rates. Depending on the game of course, perhaps 5 - 20% frame rate drop

Also, when my battery got down to ~35% charge, performance just fell on its face. Even with all power saving turned off everywhere, it seems to clock the card back when battery is low.. perhaps it cannot maintain the current. Or perhaps protecting the battery. Frame rate restores within a second of plugging power in.

So even though it goes for ~1 hour on batteries with the 7970, only 45 minutes of that time was actually useful at all in gaming.

-Tristan