Woefull battery life

Guys I wanted to ask you whether SSDs noticeably improve battery life.
Thing is I replaced my one spinning platter that came with the R4 with a 840pro , and the remaining msata and 2.5" SSD (liteon/oem ssd by dell...that I got as brand new off eBay) were also replaced to improve on battery life

Qs is my battery life (with zero percent damage/degen )gives me 04:15 minutes where as my previous r4 could do 5:45 min.

 

What is with the recent amount of people that are concerned with battery life lol .....

As we have stated in other threads.....battery life with an Alienware is pretty much just to check your email....these machines were never designed to get very far from an outlet. That being said yes changing to an SSD should give you better battery life as you have no moving parts to power. As to whether it will offer a dramatic improvement I can't speak towards as I have replaced both the HDD in my R4 and 17 as soon as I got them unboxed with my SSD.

Other things to check
-Screen brightness
-Wifi / Bluetooth on
-Integrated or discrete GPU
-Power saver or high performance mode
-What your actually doing at the time...browsing the internet will use less then playing a game etc....

As to the 4 hours your getting , that is pretty good and more then some others are getting, and if you were getting almost 6 hours on your last one well all I can say is that is pretty out of the ordinary from what others have posted as it is a great deal longer then most see. My last R4 would get about 4 hours on power saver and that was not really doing much with it, but I prefer my screen a little on the brighter side. My current 17 sees even worse battery life, under 4 hours at best. Either way the farthest this thing goes on battery is from my living room to my office on battery for the most part.

The other thing to take into account is most batteries are not identical, you can and will get different amounts of power from them, although it is usually not that significant.

Quite honestly these things were never designed with power management in mind when it came to battery life and the fact that I get more then an hour if I choose it quite impressive for the size of the battery.

 

Brother MogRules pretty much summed it up, but I did have one more plausible cause. Did you go from a non 3d model to a 3d model? If the gpu is being used even on idle your battery will drop quite a bit faster.

 

well, Mog and bigtony, thank you for your quick replies,

All i can say is
- I am "particular" when it come to power saving,
- i have always had a non-3d model with an ATI paired...
- all the figures i am giving you are on a power saving ,one notch above nil for backlight, wifi on, IGP, and the AFx on "gone dark" completely.
- the battery with which i scored the battery life was on a samsung cell, the ones i am using are simplo....unfortunately it looks like the samsungs arent as "hardy" on "batery life" as are the simplo
- the reason why battery life is important, that most of my presentations i make, aren't going to run on an iPad (my primary tablet) and to display these .ppt's in all the hardwork i have put into requires something to power a laptop for a good 4~5 hours, so i can use the workplace's library to add data at my leisure.


i was just wondering if anyone knew whether the Dell supplied OEM Liteon were power hungry, and that i could perhaps replace the ssd into my wife's laptop (which she uses to its limits) with the liteon and get something else to replace it....perhaps something from the EVO series (i already have the 256 Samsung Pro, and a DELL OEM Liteon 256MSATA and the 512 SATA on a 2.5" interface.

and @ Mog, dont get me wrong, i know exactly what i was getting my self into when i went for the R4, its just that the battery life seems to be failing me, and i assume that it might be the Liteon's i replaced.

 

You should be able to pull some more battery life with SSD's.

 

Under load an SSD typically gives you 2 W. A HDD consumes apx 6w. No load. apx 1 vs 4.

All depending on your computers load and your usage.
If you have the normal 90Wh battery and it lasts you almost 6 hours, you use less than 16W on your system avg. (that is very low usage i guess)
3-4W difference is significant. More than 17-18% at least.

 

Naa more like 4.15 or 4.30 within the profile I stated, it's just that when I was running the same thing on the simplo with a hdd and ssd +msata I was getting close to 5+hours

 

Any more advice guys

 

Well, regardless the SSD uses a LOT less than HDD.
Any HDD power is double power as full thrill for SSD, when HDD is not in use. SSD has a lot less idle power consumtion, nearly to be ignored.
If the SSD is your system disk, the HDD will pretty much idle all the time if not in use. (still 4W)

DVD/Blueray is even higher than HDD.
Less disks also = less power, even not in use.

If you have 4 hours not 5 hours 3-4 W is still significant since battery is only 90Wh.

The answer again, yes SSD does significantly increase your battery life over HDD, any day.

 

Thank you all for all the responses, I guess I have to wait this one out, till AW makes something of a cross over ultra book with the gaming innards of an AW 17

 

For anyone reading this thread, I did a fifth discharge cycle and

With brightness 2 notches above zero
Power Saving profile
Wifi on
On IGp with its standard power saving features enabled
AFx on "go dark"

6.17...measured with 7% alarm enabled

This has also happened coincidentally having installed the latest 13.12 whql on the 7970M

 

Lol you'll always have a certain cost for high performance.

That battery life looks good though.

 

Yeah but you see that is with enduro enabled. I really need that battery supply to make a presentation or present one (and mine run into 30+ minutes due to the ensuing discussion) and the occasional movie.

The brightness has never been too important for me, the screen is clear enough for me to read