Actual battery life with the Dell XPS 15 9550

I keep reading ratings of "up to 17 hours" and I find that pretty bs. I have been using mine for a week (specs in sig) and get 4-5 hours max on 1 charge. Granted, I do a mix of medium load tasks, such as installation, YouTube, videos, etc., but how does this translate to almost 17 hours of what I presume is low load?

My laptop is pretty much as low as you can go in terms of power usage, save for an SSD. I mean, I get that manufacturers overrate their battery lives like cars get their mpg overrated, but 17 hours seems like TOO much of a stretch. If Dell said 7-8 hours then it'd be much more believable, given my experience.

 

I get around 5-6 hours with the smaller battery on low brightness.

 

Battery is a HUGE issue & unknown. Can people please post back their results?

Don't forget to say your screen (FHD/4K) and battery size. Im very curious to know what people actually get from the FHD & 84Whr.

 

I have a 84 whr with qhd.
I get about 2-3 hours with light mutimedia usage and 5-6 hours of regular usage without multimedia.
I haven't played games with it. It likely won't last an hour.
I have a 2015 with QHD as well. Regular usage without multimedia is about the same.

 

4k, large batter, i7, 16gb, 512ssd; An hour of browsing eats probably 30-40%. An hour of using windows explorer (organizing files and photos) ate up more than 50%. This is week one though, so I am hoping power management gets better.

 

4k/i7/16gb/512 ssd and I get 5-6 hours of browsing/normal use.

 

If I'm just browsing around the web, YouTube, etc. I'm getting 4-6 hours of battery life since the 1.1.15 bios update. About an hour more than before. I accidentally played Fallout 4 on battery power last weekend (thought it was plugged in) and it lasted a bit over 2 hours doing that.

 

feel like this data has become pretty normalized if you read enough forums

I have UHD and 84 wHr battery with Core i5

I'm getting 6.5-7 hours standard use in power saver mode - also backed up by powercfg /batteryrepot. If I add some more media streaming to the mix, it's more like 5.5-6 hours battery life. Latest BIOS offers big jumps in how long this thing lasts untethered.

Those saying their browsing eats 50% in one hour have something seriously messed up going on. I do find Chrome the best browser to use though. The new edge browser seems to have too many runaway memory leak problems for me, although it is by far the smoothest browser to use and runs 4k video from YouTube the best.

I don't game unplugged, but I'm gathering like most, it will net 2-2.5 hours max. This was also backed up by NotebookChecks review of the XPS15.

FHD with 84wHr would be interesting to see. I'm betting it would net 8-10 hours in power saver doing light tasks.

 

mine says 5 hours but I have not put it to the test yet, I have the i7 4k with a 950 pro.

 

Dell should have put 100whr battery like apple did

 

FHD/i5/8gb/256ssd about 5-6 hours of normal use

 

I have the i7/4k/1TB SSD/84Wh variant.
Getting around 6 hours of moderate usage (Office 2016 + Chrome)
This is on Wifi, bluetooth mouse connected (MX Anywhere 2), brightness 10/20% (I can't believe how bright this screen is!) and active synchronisations (Exchange, OneDrive Personal and Pro, several SharePoint libraries).

It's more than twice the battery life I was getting with my 3-year old Vaio S15 (i7 quad-core with GeForce GPU and FHD LED screen).

So I'm pretty satisfied

 

i have the fhd model with the 84whr battery. after the bios update, battery bar still puts me at around 5:45 hours. shouldn't i be getting more than this?

 

You should for sure. I don't use battery bar, but real world usage I get 7-9 hours in class with my 84whr and FHD...

 

actually it's pretty weird. my laptop had been on for about an hour, and battery bar is giving me estimations of 7 hours left, but before it was fluctuating a lot between 5 and 6.

idk maybe my battery just needs to be calibrated or something. i haven't actually times a full cycle yet I don't think.

 

Ok I must say calibration did wonders. Just did one pass. There's some weird stuff still going on with my computer (like it was stuck at 99% for the longest time, though that could be battery saving), but I am getting much better reported numbers both from battery bar and Windows. Before battery bar consistently reported 5 hrs run time max. Now I did just reset the profile, but even so I do not ever remember seeing such good numbers, especially in the drain area (it would always be above 10 mW).

The calibration also removed what was reported as a huge amount of wear on my battery (it was a reported 7.1%).

Real-world usage remains to be seen with my re-calibrated battery. I do not expect to hit 9 hrs as pictured above, but I am looking for min 6, ideally 7-9 (in line with notebookcheck).

So if you're struggling with reported battery life, let it drain to 5% (not sure about more), then charge it back up.

 

I noticed on this one that the 4% wear still allowed it to charge to full, anyway I swapped batteries with the one i'm sending back as that had 0% wear after a discharge calibration.

 

which profile did you reset?

 

Battery bar has it's own profiles