G73JH Issues only on battery

On my G73JH-X2 I am having odd issues that I never have when the laptop is plugged in.

I was playing Dirt2 on battery and everything just seemed slower. Then I started to watch a blu-ray rip and it started skipping... when I tried to skip to a different part of the movie it would artifact. Also, I have noticed this slight buzzing noise from under the keyboard that only happens when it is running under battery power... it is really annoying. You put your ear right next to the keyboard.. when I plug the power back in... it goes away.

This is my first laptop and I'm not happy about this, any ideas?

 

Uh, yeah. Gaming and blu-ray playback are very resource-intensive. You probably dropped either into the "balanced" power setting which scaled everything back, or one of the Power4Gear battery settings. If you want, you can choose one of the high-performance settings, but expect that battery life to get sucked out with a quickness.

The noise, I don't know about. I wouldn't worry about the artifacting either if it doesn't do it under better power situations.

 

This is normal (not the buzzing sound).

When on battery, the laptop auto-throttles down to something like 70% of gpu and cpu capacity. Possibly even lower for Cpu. Dirt 2 drops from 42 fps on high with ac plugged in, to 24-26 on battery.

 

The only options I have selected for the battery are "balanced" and the lower setting that I can't remember... Is there a way to add a setting to it? (I re-formatted and didn't re-load everything from the Asus CDs)

Even running only firefox when the battery was at 20% seemed to lag and become buggy.

 

I've run the battery all the way down before plugging it in and never had Firefox act up on me at all.

There should be a High Performance setting along with Balanced, even if you don't have the Power4Gear software loaded.

 

Found the high performance setting... it was hiding at the bottom under a pull down menu. I'm really surprised they try and hide it like that because I've been running balanced even when it is plugged in, haha.

Tonight I'll run down the battery and see if I get the same issues under the High Performance setting.

 

Just FYI, I always run balanced on both this laptop and my desktop and have never had a problem. I think it's good to reduce heat when not being heavily used. I don't think it really affects performance when under load, at least not by eye. The only time I force it to high performance is when I am benchmarking.

I never game or watch movies on battery on this thing, the battery to me is more for surfing or light tasks.

 

Whether you are on high performance or balanced, Ati powerplay is enabled and will cut the Gpu significantly while on battery power. You have to go into the CCC or advanced mode for power plans to change it.

 

the buzzing is actually somewhat normal. I lost count of how many notebook complaints i got about buzzing. some are definitely louder then others and that is abnormal. I have a notebook comming back from a customer that couldnt get it to play dirt for more then half an hour. It also many times could not complete multiple loops of 3dmark. should be here in a few days. this would be my 4th rma. I had a notebook return once from a guy that said the buzzing gave him a headache. I though he was nuts, then i got it and felt what he felt minus the physical agony.