increase your battery life by 2 to 3 times when playing games HERE!

I know not many of you need to save power as long as you can! just some people need every last bit of it! and that's why we're here! lately I've been measuring my GT780DXR to find anyway to increase battery life when playing games like orcs must die, trackmania, portal, etc!

LAPTOP USED: MSI GT780DXR (specs in the signature)

TOOLS USED:
energenie (watt meter)
Coretemp
MSI afterbuner (a must have)
batterybar (a suggested app for an accurate battery readings)


methods used:
-use dim screen and disable any flashy features (aero, backlit keyboard, etc)
-forcing the CPU to work at 800Mhz (which is "still" enough for most games)
-setting the refresh rate to 40hz and vsync on through drivers!
-disable nvidia's optimus and switch to intel GPU "OR" leave it to nvidia since it's working on 74mhz when on battery!
-if possible, disable any multithreading features though the application itself!
-if possible, make the software as the renderer instead of DirectX or OpenGL!
-lower the game graphics to the least playable settings!
-in source games! open the developers console and type "disconnect" then "sv_cheat 1", "fps_max XX" to the value you want! (30fps is suggested!)

suggested resolution:
1280x720 for 16:9 sceens
1280x800 for 16:10 screens

IF YOU HAVE A WATT METER AND HAVE AN NVIDIA GPU if you implemented all of the written above you should get around 64 watts while playing games, relax! this is the nvidia GPU working at it's maximum core clock! if you plug it out it should work at 74mhz and get for around 36 watts during playing games, and if still work at maximum for clock! switch to intel GPU immediately or to the power saver plan! god help you otherwise!

if you want to do some maths about battery life then the following should help you:

battery capacity (Wh) / power consumption = total battery life

ex: 87Wh / 36 watts = 2.41 (or 2:15)


Q: how to force the CPU to work @800mhz?
-by right click the battery icon>power option>create a new power plan>power saver
-name it as you please and when done press at "change plan setting">"change advanced power settings">"processor power management"
-set the maximum processor state to %5 when on battery only! just as pictured below!


(NOTE): this does apply on all CPU's, but not all of them will work @800Mhz when idling, most of sandy bridge CPU's will work @800Mhz!



Q: why should I set the refresh rate to 40hz and vsync on? how this will help?
the more FPS yo don't need the more power it takes no matter how the game settings are low, manually cap the FPS to limit the power consumption!

Q: I don't have a 40hz as an option in the driver, would a 60hz help?
yup! still suggest to limit the FPS anyway possible using an external app, one of them is dxtory, much like fraps with a frame limiter!

Q: why should I disable the optimus?
most of us don't need to know but just in case why increase the chance of crashes and BSOD's? booting the system takes almost %3 of battery life! besides the intel GPU does what you need, you don't need maximum power! playing at medium-low settings in an 18h of flight won't kill you!


I really hope this helped you and any suggestion and discussion would be helpful too! we, the sky gamers would appreciate any helpful tips that would increase the laptop battery life during gaming!

 

Okay, but what actual increase in run time did you achieve on battery power?

 

increased by 1 hour and 25 mins (total of 2:45 of gameplay) when playing trackmania at minimum settings after using these settings and very certain this will apply on other games as well!

 

Very impressive!

I'll have to try this with my Asus notebook when used as a 'notebook' (a digital notepad...).

I'm getting pretty good times with it now, wonder if it can increase (without affecting the 'feel' of the system for me)?

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/7766632-post2079.html

Thanks for the post.

+rep.

 

Really OP, you may as well advocate us going back to the horse and buggy days. J/K

Your idea is sound; and learning about these choice are why I come here.

 

I guess these are some very old games then. But 40Hz is way too low.

 

your welcomed! I do not post myths done a lot of research on this one!

90% will work with newer games as well! the power consumption numbers is what makes the difference here! not how old the game is! fallout new vegas initially came with same timings but never had the chance for a full testing!

40hz is pretty playable, at least to me you're just capping the fps to 40fps that way! but you can still use the 60hz! just make sure vsync is on, you don't want to render needless frames as they do consume energy and consume a LOT of it!

 

In source games you could use a frame cap instead of vsync so you don't get a slide show if you drop below your refresh rate. It also reduces the input lag which vsync can sometimes introduce.

 

I would be appreciated if you can give me the link for that!

EDIT: nvm! found a way! thanks man! that helped a lot for playing at higher resolution at same power consumption! infos will be added!

 

A few things:
(1) Not sure how capping framerate will reduce power consumption, I've seen no evidence of this from past experience. The frequency of the monitor has no bearing on how fast your video card runs or power it consumes. Forcing a refresh can damage a monitor as well.

(2) Why 1280x768 for 16:9? 1280x720 is true 16:9 and would make for a true representation of scale, and if your monitor is 1366x768 reducing 86 pixels won't make a difference since 99% of LCD power drain comes from the backlight. And if your GPU is limited, you can run at 1080p if you want, it just won't consume that much more energy, it will just run slower. Plus at 74MHz your GPU will be capped regardless of resolution it's running.

(3) Using software as a renderer will just make your CPU work harder and not your GPU. It's just trading off one thing for another.

(4) How did you measure battery life? True time (actually played until 5% battery) or estimate from BatteryBar?

Your suggestions 1,2, and 4 above make sense, but everything else won't make a lick of difference. Most "gaming" laptops you don't have to set the power profile options for the CPU either since they will just only run at a fixed speed when on battery to prevent too much power draw. You can set it at 0% too, it doesn't matter. Depending on the CPU it is divided between your lowest p-state to your maximum p-state, and then divided between number of P-states to get % spread.

You very likely could get close to your 2:45 mins of gameplay just by restricting CPU and GPU speed and none of that other stuff.

I spent numerous hours when I had an NP8130 trying to eek out battery life. It had about 2.5 hours. I did everything from reduce GPU speed to as low as it could go, limited CPU to two cores instead of four, disabled hyperthreading, and at best it added a few minutes, which was well within margin of error. Not to mention at least a dozen years working with laptops and gaming...

 

Why is there even an option to be able to enter 5% of processors state? I mean, 5% of 2.0GHz (2630QM) is 100MHz, and the CPU is not able to go more down than 800MHz.

 

yes! leaving the work to the CPU while working @800mhz will help, especially using GPU's that are not efficient (AMD...or is it?) and downclocks to 70mhz when not in use! been measuring the power consumption using watt meter, and tested the actual battery life and drained it physically! not the battery bar as it's only a mere tool to monitor since it's more accurate than windows one!

capping framerate is helpful! as I stated the more rendering needless frames the more power it takes in wattage, not core clocks! I did limit the fps in portal to 25 fps and lowered the by 4 watts, yes these little 4 watts make difference

and thanks for correcting me, I'm not really informed when it comes to screen aspect ratio

wrong! tried to leave it at fixed speeds, the cpu is just works at 800mhz but sometimes it suddenly jumps to it's full frequency (2983mhz) and it may stay like that for a minutes or until the battery drains! limiting the cpu helped the most!

800mhz is the idling frequency and the percentage is tha cpu load! my laptop ran at %5 and the frequency is is 798mhz

 

No. It's all based on P-states of the CPU, and minimum design speed. If your minimum speed of your CPU is set at 800MHz, design speed is 2.0GHz, and there's four P-states, that will step it from 800MHz to 2.0GHz at 1100, 1400, 1700, 2000, then there's four segments. 0-19% will run @ 800MHz, 20-39% will run @ 1100MHz, 40-59% will run at 1400, 60-79% will run at 1700, and 80%+ will run at 2000.

AMD is quite efficient, not sure what you're meaning? I can play games on my DV6z with 6750m on battery for two hours at full speed, although the IGP is great for that type of thing, can play games for four hours on battery if I set resolution to 720p and lower detail.

And measuring power consumption while plugged in is one thing, but you can't see what's going on when on battery. Plus there's an efficiency from the wall through the PSU to the machine to take into account.

I've gone through and measured battery life and performance of no less than six laptops in the last year looking for the perfect laptop at best price (thank goodness for no restocking fees and free returns). Not all laptops are created equal. Most will clock the battery at a pathetic slow speed even inadequate for gaming purposes and this is only configurable to a slower speed, not higher. This is to prevent killing the battery and offering best battery life.

Capping framerate is not helpful, especially when you're using IGP, it consumes so little power to begin with, and is not that powerful that it will hardly matter.

There really is no significant battery life advantage to limiting resolution.

Maybe your specific machine, but I said "most". If you check many other gaming laptops, people are a bit disappointed with the CPU and GPU performance on battery and it won't run faster than 800 or 1000MHz.


Bottom line. Reducing clock speed and/or voltages will have the most significant improvement in battery life and heat. The other stuff is just frivolous that makes little to no difference.

 

I see. Learned something new today
What about turbo? Does it fit in to the P-states control?

 

I hate to break it to you, but capping your frame rate can make a large difference. I capped the frame rate on my desktop for a game at 60fps. Before I was getting over 100. With that I was also getting hotter temps. Around 67c with the cap I only got up to 52c. I'm not a physicist, but I'm Pretty sure the extra heat was from the gpu using more power.

It's only logical that capping your framerate would make a difference in battery life.

 

I stand corrected, and actually remember this post, just for whatever reason couldn't find it to re-post. But frame rate limiter does help with heat and battery life a bit.

 

I think it's time to add another information!

last week I removed 2 memory sticks and made it work at 4GB! surprised and the power consumption was reduced by 4w! I think it's the best to keep 1 large spaced memory stick on your system since 2w is the the standard power consumption for memory sticks! soon I'll order 1x8GB corsair along with samsung 830 SSD!

 

Yeah I found that too, for netbooks that are already power sipping, a single RAM chip will save even more battery life. However, on AMD chips, the IGP performance greatly benefits from having dual channel RAM. You can also get 1.35V RAM which helps even a bit more.

 

So decrease performance to increase battery life ... when gaming ... really ?!?!

LOL

P.S. It could help if you're playing minesweeper I guess ...

 

^^ +1, however for who don't want replace their battery. Nice discussion thread

 

After toying around I see what OP is discussing. Why run at 150fps and grind your GPU away, when you can cap it at 50 or 60fps and not use unnecessary battery life.

 

yes! I do care about power consumption the most! some people like me who travels to europe and middle east 6 times a year in an 8-13 hour flight and accept no less than high-end gaming laptop will find this helpful! I don't want to spend an additional $999 for the M11x while I can do it for the fraction of the price! at least to an acceptable levels!

 

In any case you won't extend the life of most laptops by a whole lot, especially gaming laptops. Their cooling systems, LCD's, and other components contribute significantly to the power consumption, and dropping a few watts will add 20-30 minutes at best. Your MSI seems to be an anomaly. Heck, the Sager I had ran at minmum 20-22W idle, got 2.5 hours battery life, and dropping 2W would add 10% life so 10% of 150 minutes is 15 minutes.

I did notice a decent drop in power consumption however with the frame limiter as you suggested, so I guess if you're going to game with low performance games, it's a good idea. Back to the single RAM chip though, I'm doing some testing on my AMD Llano and Brazos systems to see performance effect. So far Llano looks like a significant hit, but Brazos not so much.

 

WHAT AAAA....


btw. What sense to play like this???

 

it's because the battery of sager has less watt-per-hour than MSI's! mine consumes 30w at idle and still get a solid 3 hours which is pretty decent for a gaming laptop! I'll be testing the battery life today and see how it goes! and this time I believe it'll be no less than additional 45 mins (I hope?)

and i'm waiting for your amd systems benchmarking, I'll be doing the same with my system to see how it'll perform with intel SB! no performance impact I hope....

I would appreciate any suggestion then..

and they do say necessity is the mother of invention! try a 6 hour trip on economy class seat which is boring, painful, and hard to get a sleep and you're lucky if they provide some entertainments! thats where the whole idea came! well, I've managed to juice it to 2:30 hours of playing but better than nothing!

 

at first I don't understand how 2.41 = 2'15"

 

well it's pretty complicated to explain, because I seriously suck at explaining anything about maths! but I'll do what I can to make things clear..

the intger here is up to 12, but more importantly we're talking about the fractions here! it represent the minutes in time! for example 2. 25 means 2: 15 minutes! (note that they're both quarters) and 2. 75 means 2 hours and 45 minutes!

please note that data I wrote in the topic was worng! 2.41 was suppose to be 2:26 in time!

 

For 0.41 hours just multiply by 60 to get minutes ~ 0.41 x 60 = 24.6 minutes
Simple as that!

 

This is not how you convert units. It works because that's a simple conversion only, but if you have to go through multiple conversions you'll get stuck. Here's how you convert units:

(2.41 hours) x (60 minutes)/(in 1 hour) = (144.6 minutes)

144.6 minutes = 2x60+24.6 => 2 hours + 24.6 minutes

Note that 24.6 minutes is 24 minutes and 36 seconds

----

but here's an idea for the OP:

drop your 2 HDDs and install low powered SSD such as Samsung of your choice. This way you can save over 6 watts at intensive I/O, and about 1.5 to 2 watts at idle. Then use external enclosure or caddy to use the HDDs if you still need those while gaming. In other words - increase performance while increase battery life as well

 

thats why I'm ordering a samsung 830 soon as I get $$$ in my hands! that ssd consumes 0.1w when active (read/write) and 0.08w idle..I was shocked about it's power consumption when I saw the reviews, also intel 320 series done pretty good job as well but I prefer samsung for the sata III interface!

 

LOL. That is exactly what I did. It's not hard. I know all about unit conversion being an engineer for 15 years. Hell most of the time I do it all in my head. But fractions of hours multiply by 60 to get minutes, fractions of minutes x 60 to get seconds, yes it is that simple.

Eh, it consumes 0.3W when idle and as much as 3W when active:
- http://www.storagereview.com/samsung_ssd_830_review_256gb

Most of the time the power consumption numbers published are way off from actual. Still pretty decent compared to most hard drives, although WD Caviar Blue I had measured 0.5W when idle, granted that's 5400RPM compared with super fast SSD. And idle usually doesn't take into account garbage collection or TRIM routines that will make the drive active for periods.

 

hmmm still consumes 1.77w for sequential read! while the scorpio black takes about 3w regardless.. I've seen companies lying about specs but never imagned to be tough as this one..seriously how did they measured their devices to get 0.1w active?

 

Intel claims 0.06W idle. It's more like 0.6W idle although active it's less than 2W, that's for my X25-M G2. I don't know how or why the OEMs measure what they do, but I usually read reviews to get a more accurate assessment.

 

Good job Cap!

I have to take 9 hour flights so your MSI could take a serious hit when the unthoughtful clown in front slams his seat back! LOL, your GPU would melt the opposite tray?

My dinky 13" Ul30vt gets about 3.5 hours playing old games or 4.5 hours of movies but can get more if i turn unneeded things (nVidia and RF) off. Battery now at 12% wear.

I'm going to experiment with the screen refresh and try a single stick of Samsung Green memory down the road.

Cheers

 

good luck hydra, and don't forget to share the result here

======

I've done the test about removing the memory stick! played trackmania nations for 3 solid hours which gained 15 minutes after removing sticks, however I can tell that I could EASILY reach to 3:30 but forgot to cap the frame rates on and the renderer to software during first %50 of battery life resulting the cpu to consume more than 6w! I'm going to do the test again tomorrow!

 

40hz, bleck, but yes vsync does cap power consumption, your gfx card renders enough frames and then stops.

 

Correct me if i'm wrong but the MSI gt780 DXR does not support Optimus.

 

just to add: if you have multiple drives in the computer you can disable them from powering on in the bios, and possibly disable USB completely if you are gaming without a mouse, also possible to turn off the wireless adapter if you do not have signal on the go.... the hdd itself should save yo 3.75W itself...