Power Consumption with T61/R61?

i'm running ubuntu gutsy/nvidia graphics, and was curious as to others' power consumption. i'm particularly interested in what windows users are seeing. idling at lowest screen brightness, i'm around 12.6W. light web browsing at more acceptable brightness is more like 14.5-15W.

 

I don't know about wattage, but I get about five and half hours with my R60 on a new nine cell battery running XP. The screen at 4/7, WiFi on, doing normal stuff. I get a little over four hours with the same settings running Gutsy. I have the Intel card so that probably helps some.

 

My T61 with 3GB of ram and a Seagate 7200 120GB HD consumes 30-35W while doing basic stuff (keeping the cpu usage low).

 

@ZaZ: If you're using windows, you can use Notebook Hardware Control ( http://www.pbus-167.com/) to keep tabs on the Watt usage.

For linux you can try PowerTOP ( http://linuxpowertop.org/) which won't give you watt usage, but it will give you stats on what wakes your CPU up so you can know what is using the most power.

 

actually, powertop does give you wattage, at least when running on battery power. that's what i'm using for my numbers.
@smartins: 30-35W is more than i use compiling a kernel--something ain't right there.
@ZaZ: did you do anything to optimize usage with gutsy? out of the box, gutsy definitely isn't very good with power. what numbers do you get using powertop? are you using laptop-mode, do you have wireless settings on power saving mode, etc?

 

I just found powertop and tried it on my T61p with T9300 running OpenSUSE 10.3 64-bit kernel. Average power use is around 25W, and that's with dynamic clock. KPowersave reports a lower number around 20W.

 

Didn't really do too much.

 

I measured power usage using two separate hardware energy cost meters, Olympia EKM 2000 and Voltcraft Energy Check 3000 so I'm pretty sure this value is close to the real one.

With the screen off it uses about 20W and with the screen on 28-30W when idle.

 

so these values are with the laptop plugged in? that makes a bit more sense...

 

Yes, with the laptop plugged in.

 

well, here's a script that i wrote/stole from other sources that changes some power settings that isn't done automatically.

Code:

#! /bin/bash
#'sched_mc_power_savings' tunable under /sys/devices/system/cpu/ controls the Multi-core related tunable. By default, this is set to '0' (for optimal performance). By
#setting this to '1', under light load scenarios, the process load is distributed such that all the cores in a processor package are busy before distributing the
#process  load to other processor package
echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/sched_mc_power_savings
#disable wake on lan
ethtool -s eth0 wol d
#set wifi to battery mode
echo 7 > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/iwl3945/0000\:03\:00.0/power_level
echo min_power > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/link_power_management_policy
#disable cd-rom polling
hal-disable-polling --dev /dev/hda
#disable uhci-hcd module
rmmod uhci-hcd

here's a link to how i got it load/unload automagically...
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=645433

this all helped my power consumption tremendously.