Power Saver vs Balanced

What is the impact on battery life between both (assuming the brightness is the same)?

I've notice that on PS mode, the CPU never tops 800mhz, whereas on Balanced mode, the CPU sometimes goes to 1.6ghz but only when invoked.

Note that i am currently using an i5-4200u processor.

 

Won't it also depend on which OS you are using..

 

Windows 8.1 64 Bit Non-Pro OEM

 

Depending on the workload you are expecting to put on the system; the PS mode may very well frustrate you to no end (and even give less battery life too).


Balanced is almost always the best profile to use - battery savings when possible, with performance on tap as needed.


Take care.

 

Power Saver is designed for best battery life. And is really intended for the most basic tasks like web surfing and document editing and watching videos (which may suffer in power saver depending on the file being viewed). Otherwise, depending on OS and machine of course, balanced is best for any meaningful work, and my personal findings are that it doesn't reduce battery life by a whole lot.

 

Power saver / balanced, don't really mean anything since you can customize all the profiles. Not only that, but each computer is different. Just try different things out for yourself and measure power consumption.

 

Even if you customize the profiles, Power Saver especially will set the hardware in states you cannot with balanced or high performance.

 

Not really, they are just registry edits.

 

Yes, but you can't access them through using Balanced or High Performance power profiles. You could use powercfg.exe to access most of these, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you know what the heck you're doing.

 

You're really asking what the impact on battery life is in minutes? That's kind of a ridiculous question, no one can tell you that unless they have an identical system and are doing the same things.

The battery life could be exactly the same if you're browsing the web but if you're rendering video constantly, power saver might be twice as much... assuming you have a lot of video to render either way, as it would probably be twice the speed on balanced mode.

It's funny to me that NBR members always manage to answer a more complicated question than the one that was asked.

Edit: I guess you can run lots of calculation and go into various hypothetical scenarios but in the end it's going to be way more accurate to just time your battery life or get a kill-a-watt or something.

 

Lenovo's built in Power Management software is pretty powerful, at least for ThinkPads, adunno if they port that over to the IdeaPad line..