Battery life with soft gamming... :( need help

Hi,

well 2 days ago i got my new toshiba a100-847 with the 7600 256mb, 2gb ram, 7200 2ghz, 100gb.

So i used the laptop for 2 days on my desk being charged all time, finaly today i went away with it, it was full battery, i played fifa mamanger 07 for 1 hour and my battery went out :O

I rly cant understand how can a game like FM07 which doesnt use much graphics and power consume a whole battery in 1 hour. My WiFi was off. My battery save options were on normal.

Please can any1 help me to get my battery life longer with maybe some better options? I rly dont need best graphics just to play the manager game for more than 1 hour.

Thanks in advance...

 

A game makes the hdd spin faster, causing battery life to go down.

Think of the difference between a psp and a ds...

1 hour is about all you'll get, and you are lucky to get that.

 

FM 07 is a pretty demanding game. It's no surprise that your battery died after 1 hours as the Toshiba A100 isn't known for its battery life.
Your only option would be to upgrade the battery.

 

I rly cant understand how you can see a game completely drain your battery in an hour, and then claim that it doesn't use much power...

It should be pretty plain to see that it, any any other game, does use lots of power, simply because you can see it killing your battery.

There are plenty of reasons for this. One is that regardless of how good the graphics are, the graphics card is always kept busy in games. Every frame has to be rendered from scratch, so the GPU and CPU are running full speed all the time.

Then there's harddrive activity, CD/DVD drive activity and so on.

All games use lots of power.

 

Zellio, a harddrive uses just 9 Watt. Compared with the videocard he has (20-30 Watt) I think it is mostly his videocard that consumes most of the battery. Your CPU can be hungry too, Merom's are not the most efficient processor.

Charlie

 

Here are a couple of tricks I use to save battery life. Yes, they will hurt your frame rates, but it's always an option to adjust these settings.
Just keep this in mind: better performance = less battery life and vice versa.

Ok, lower your graphics card's performance settings when on battery life. ATI has PowerPlay settings that allow you to drastically reduce how much power your graphics card consumes, when you're unplugged. Also, you can lower your processor's clock speed so that it draws less power whether on battery or plugged in. I have an Acer 8104, which allows me to use Acer's ePowerManagement software to do this. I can either get 45 minutes of battery life while gaming with everything set to high (plenty of time for a lunch break gaming session), or I can tweak these settings and double that amount of battery life.

Good luck,
Ransom

 

Actually a mobile 7900gs is 30w, but both would cause a big problem...

 

And the merom only gives 39 watts of power, it's actually not so bad...

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2009717,00.asp

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/08/22/amd_dual_core_laptops_have_arrived/page17.html

I don't know why they only rated the Turion X2 versus the Core Duo, but the battery life of the core duo killed the turion x2...

And the battery life of the merom is only a tad worse then the core duo...

 

My laptop gets an hour of battery life playing cod2 with no power saving stuff on....

 

The Go7900GS has a TDP of 20W. Merom's TDP is 34W.

TDP isn't an accurate measure of power consumption. I believe it is a number given to manufacturers so they know how to cool the thing. That's one of the reasons that Intel bumped up the TDP of the Core 2 Duo to 34W; the Core Duo's was 31W.

 

Yup, what Chaz said. It has nothing to do with power consumption (not all the power it consumes is dissipated as heat, for one thing. Also, it is an upper bound only, it's how much manufacturers should make sure their design can handle *in the worst case*. That's why AMD uses the same TDP for half their processors. Sure, they all dissipate different amounts of heat, and they all use different amounts of power, but life gets a lot easier for heatsink manufacturers if they can just take the TDP for the fastest CPU and assume that goes for the slower CPU's as well. And if they report a higher-than-neccesary TDP, so what? It just means the manufacturers will have to put slightly better heatsinks on the chip, meaning less risk of overheating, and more potential for overclocking.

One trick that might lower power consumption a bit is to make sure vsync is enabled. That prevents the game from rendering more frames than the screen can display, which means it occasionally pauses for a short while, using less power while waiting for the display to catch up.

 

Gaming will shorten your battery life. It is unavoidable for the reasons above.

Lowering the screen brightness will help get you a little more gaming time.