What is with the dv6 quad battery?

I love my new dv6, but what is with the battery life.
HP says up to 5 1/2 hours!
On intel gpu and doing nothing or just browsing, 1 1/2-2hrs
On AMD gpu or playing a video or game 45min-1hr.
HP way overstated the battery life, a quad core with a six
cell battery won't get anywhere near what they claim.
And I am not going to turn my brightness all the way down to
get an extra 5 minutes. Any ideas, or is there a place to get
a 12 cell battery for this beast?

 

Well to get best battery life, don't run screen at full brightness, a few notches down and it should help a bit.

Go into advanced power options and set CPU minimum 5% (should be default) and max 50%. This will keep the CPU from running at its max speed. Make sure to set your power profile to "HP Recommended" or even "power saver".

Also disable the Bluetooth if you're not using it. On my DV6z I had to go into device manager and Network Adapters and disable it there because disabling it through the connection manager would turn off wi-fi too.

There is a 9-cell, but not a 12 cell that I know of. With my AMD CPU/GPU I can get > 6 hours with the 9-cell with web browsing.

Also download BatteryBar or BatteryCare and use the machine on battery for one discharge with those programs installed and running for it to calibrate properly. It will give you a good estimate of battery life and power consumption as you try different things to get power consumption down. Although with the Intel Quad CPU you will be lucky to get the system to run less than 15W total, but you should still be able to get 2.5-3 hrs surfing.

 

If you're only getting 2 hours on battery browsing the internet, you're doing something very wrong. At 40% brightness, I get 5 hours.

 

Change the power scheme...

 

Thanks for the Bluetooth tip, I never use it and disabled it.
I refuse to limit my cpu to 50% or anything less than what it
normally speedsteps at. I also use the second to brightest screen
setting. I guess I just won't slow down and dim my computer to get
an extra 1/2 hr of battery, I bought a fast, beautifull 1080p laptop to
use those features. I have a 7 year old 13" sony laptop that lasts 5 hours,
but it is 1024x768, single core. Just sayin that HP claims 5 hours, well ok 5 hours if you make it run at 40% brightness and 50% cpu speed, kind of defeats the point of buying a high end laptop in the first place.

 

Hey Hockeymass,
Your CPU/GPU isn't as hot as you think it is.

During heavy gaming my cpu can get up to 95
and my GPU can get up to 85 degrees C. Is this
"normal" and ok for this laptop? Seems kinda hot
to me, especially since cpu gets close to the 100 degree
max before meltdown point? Is there a utility to
undervolt the cpu? I doubt it needs as much power as it
is getting, my desktop sandy quad is at 4.7ghz with 1.3v
and never gets above 70 degrees.

 

Yep, the 9 cell could get you around 6 to 7 hours of internet and word use and half brightness. This is with the 9-Cell battery.
I usually have steam, Rainmeter, Rocketdock running in the background when on battery. I also have seen estimates of close to 8 1/2 hours while only doing excel and word. I never have turned off wifi or the mouse light off.

You can get a 9-Cell on ebay for $69.
eBay - New & used electronics, cars, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods & more at low prices

 

Computer literacy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

I checked out Ebay. This could be REAL interesting if it is 100% compatible,
says it is and it is a 12 cell 8800mah (now that's a battery)

12 cell Extended-Life Battery for HP (MU09) WD549AA#ABB | eBay

 

But from the picute the connector seems to be in the correct place as what the battery is right now. So it might fit but the policy is not that good, so no returns if it does not fit as this is a off market battery not a direct battery that HP makes. So they where able to make a 12-cell for the dv6-6000.

 

Sounds like you have a defective battery.

 

The HP 9 cell battery is rated at 100 Whr, or 10000 mah, which is 13% greater than the 12 cell battery. More number of cells don't really mean more power.

As for OP, either get a 9 cell battery, or try changing your use habits. Anyways, my Core i7 down-clocks to 880 Mhz, so it hardly matter if I cap it at 60% or not.

 

It's not 50% CPU speed, and most laptops throttle the CPU and GPU on battery anyhow, they're not designed to run at full power on battery. 0% is at it's minimum speed step state (800MHz?) 50% will be about 1.6GHz. Assuming you have an i7-2630QM? You can't undervolt Intel CPU's unless you get an XM CPU, and even then the BIOS has to support it, plus they cost like $800.

Like I said monitor your power drain using BatteryBar or BatteryCare and you can get an idea what's consuming the power by adjusting things.

Yes, good point on the battery, Whr or mah are what matter. Regarding the down-clock, does it speed step at all, or fixed at 880MHz? Because setting min and max speed it will limit how far it will speed step or turbo. Even if fixed 880MHz on this chip is still pretty powerful, but shouldn't be consuming a lot of energy especially at idle or low use.

 

The 5 hour claim is with the assumption that you're using the HP Recommended power plan. If you're not using that, how can they tell you how long the battery will last? And screen brightness eats up way more than a half hour of battery between 40 and 100% brightness. It's just common knowledge that you have to make tradeoffs to get decent battery life.

As far as your temps, I'm surprised that your CPU is getting that hot. 85 on the GPU isn't anything to be worried about, though. Do you consistently get those kind of temperatures on the CPU?

 

The bus speed of the my CPU ( i7-2360qm ) is about 100 MHz and it speedsteps from multiplier of 8 to all way up to 20, and turbo boosts further to 29. So in fact, CPU is the last thing I would optimize to increase battery life.

What does eat a lot of battery is the screen brightness, weak Wi-Fi, and graphics card.

I did a real test yesterday, and got 4 hours of flash music and website surfing on Wi-Fi with HP Recommended power plan, and graphics card turned off. I think I can easily get ~5:30 hours when I do only Office work. But yeah anyways, all companies, except Apple, always inflate their battery number. There is little we can do about stopping these chumps from making useless claims.

And I forgot to add, I have the 6 cell extended battery (62 WHr).

 

Well in order to get consistent numbers there needs to be a battery test standard set. Same test, same settings and then at least you would have an idea from machine to machine.

I kind of wish I got the high capacity 6-cell, because the hump on the 9-cell seemed nice at first, but for a laptop cooler is a hindrance. Oh well, it is what it is.

 

Yeah, my cpu does run up to 95 degrees during prime or heavy gaming, high eighties when all cores are loaded, and it does speedstep from 800mhz up to 2500mhz. I have the 2360 quad. I guess I like things on the power hungry settings, and I like my 1080p screen bright. I am surprised to hear that an LED backlit screen uses that much power, we are talking low power LED, not the old CFL (which weren't even that much of a power hog). It must all be the graphics card and processor load. If the 9 cell hump is annoying, I will just get a second 6 cell for when I am away from power. I play FPS games (Dead Island, Deus Ex, etc.) and think I get about 1/2hr to 45 minutes per battery!

 

The hump on the 9-cell is actually nice, unless you're using a laptop cooler, then it just raises the angle too high.

 

Isn't the hump only about 1/2 the length of the laptop and make it wobbly?

 

Not wobbly at all. It's about 2/3 the width (25cm battery vs 38cm width 25/38 ~ 66%). Most of the heft is in between the pads on the battery anyhow. I can put considerably amount of pressure on one side and it doesn't tip. It is off center though, so can actually tip on the left side with enough pressure, but so far not much of an issue.