M17-poor performance on battery?

When I try and play games on my M17 when it's running on battery rather than plugged in, the game performance is very poor. It's set to high performance, I've set the ATi Catalyst manager to use maximum performance, and yet it can't run Crysis on Low when on battery despite playing it fine on High when plugged in.

Is there a reason for this and any way I can make the gaming performance on battery as good as the gaming performance plugged in?

One thing I noticed was that none of the components were getting hot. The 3870s hit 70C, whereas I've hit 85C plugged in, processor cores never went above 60...Is it just an issue of the battery can't supply enough power or something?

 

Did you got to the bottom right task bar and set it to high performance?

 

Gaming on battery = fail. Regardless of your power profile, your computer will scale back power.

 

I prefer not to think of the M17's battery as a battery, as that depresses me. I think of it as an uninterrupted power supply (UPS) unit, which makes me feel better. Do not game on batteries.

 

As I said (if you actually read it ) it was set to high performance.

So this is the reason, because my M17 scales back power?

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5011835&postcount=35

from this thread, which made me laugh:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=392810

 

Is there any way to make the system NOT conserve power so that I can actually play Crysis on battery life? -.-

 

You'll probably last about 20 mins on battery if you could lol.

 

go in ccc and change your gpu's to high performance in powerplay for the battery. in high performance power profile it will still downclock because it is following the settings in ccc.

 

If you haven't done this then you should

But i couldn't understand what you set in CCC by your description ....

.....

 

sorry being lazy and i'm rushing for work.
right click desktop
choose ccc(c????? control center)
choose on the left side power play
you will see to setting to choose on the right. battery power and plugged in.
under battery power you will see a option that says max life and high performance.

choose high performance.

 

CCC=Catalyst Command Center

 

I DID. -.- I even tried disabling PowerPlay which had no effect.

Yes, I know...

Eh maybe I'll just use my PS2 emulator on battery. At least the CPU seems to stay on full on performance.

 

The AlienFusion settings also have a setting for the video cards

 

BTW, Run GPU-Z, and tell us what each card drops down to in terms of mhz when you unplug it.

 

Here's mine.
First pic is power plugged in, second is on battery. its about 50% slower on battery. This is with ATI CCC set to "Maximum Battery Life" in Powerplay.

 

Here is the CCC setting and a GPU-Z shot with the battery set to max performance. As you can see its back up to full speed.

 

I set that to max performance as well.

It drops to 1.59GHz, but jumps back up to 2GHz under any sort of load.

I haven't checked mine but I used the high performance CCC setting as well...

 

No high end gaming laptop with dual graphics cards/fans etc. will last more than about 20 minutes. It's not just the M17. You either have extended battery life like with the 9400m in the M17x, or you have serious gaming performance with two GPU's.

Like was mentioned above, the battery is little more than a UPS. I'm actually considering getting a used battery for mine so I can gut it out leaving only the case for the batt. in tact to reduce weight.

 

Modify your high performance profile to have exactly the same settings when the laptop in on battery like when they are when its plugged in. That way you shouldnt notice a difference when you play on battery. As rob said, that will probably give you 15-20mins battery life while playing a game...

 

It's already like that.

 

Not your processor speed. What does each card's speed drop to. It should say ~660/850.

 

I'll do this tomorrow, I've not no time now.

 

I play a lot using the battery. max performance usually lasts 1:15minutes with lcd brightness at max.
Never had performance issues. it's the same performance as connected to the brick.
I love it. it's really great for trips.

 

My battery used to give me 2:45 when I had one 3870 in my machine. As soon as I added the second that cut down to 1:10 even with battery life optimizations in place. Seeing how my once lovely battery life was now completely compromised...I just ordered a qx9300 to finish it off.

Back to topic though, I found that in the windows power manager when set to maximum performance vs. balanced profile my 3D performance was much better.

 

The same is definately true with the Quad-Core. My Q9000 just doesn't like to run any games on Balanced power profile.

 

Please note that when I said this, I forgot that I was going on holiday the next day, therefore I hadn't got the results yet. I'm checking now.

It's back up to 654/846 on high performance running on battery. (It always seems to run on 654/846, never on 660/850 )What I don't get then is if the graphics cards and processor is on the same clocks as when it's plugged in then why is gaming performance on battery so much worse.

Are you talking about the M17 here? What are your specs, and what are the settings in your power management? My M17 won't even last 50 minutes playing Crysis on battery and it can't even manage it on low with 30+fps when on battery.