T400 Wattage

Sorry if this has been discussed before, but my wattage usage seems to be much higher than on Kevin's review. Kevin listed that he was able to get 8.5watts on integrated graphics, 60% brightness, wifi on (after setting max battery life). Using RMClock, I'm getting around 13 watts... the lowest I can seem to get is 12 or so. Using dedicated, I get much higher sometimes (in the 20s). This is just browsing the web.

I did a fresh install of vista, but ended up re-installing many of the lenovo utilities such as power manager and such. Any idea why my wattage is higher? Anyone else want to see what they're getting?

edit: looking again I found some similar threads... sorry for the repeat, but I'm still looking for advice.

 

Dedicated graphics, being more powerful, do require more power than integrated solutions. It really is the downside of discrete GPUs.

 

13 and 12 is pretty good especicially with a dedicated GPU. The lowest I could put my 8510p (yes it does have a 15.4'' screen and HD2600) was 14W with minimum brightness and idled.

One possibility is to use RMclock to undervolt.

 

I don't know if it was clear.. but I meant on integrated I got 12-13, and on discrete 20 and up.
I reinstalled the chipset drivers, and a couple vista updates, and now it's down a tiny bit (I think, seems to be about 11 now) but still not near 8.5.

I have RMClock set to the "Power Saving" profile, haven't taken a good look at what it does but I assume it lowers the clock speed/undervolts it.

 

first of all stop looking at the RCMclock. You can look at the current(which is measured in A, and measures the electric current and not the power) that is being used when on battery by launching the power manager in advanced mode and going to Battery tab, and look for "Current" field. Now that is a proper thing to look at - it measures how much of electric current is consumed from battery. And it is pretty accurate and not speculative as RCM staff.

I really don't know, with default installation of the OS, that was preloaded by lenovo I think the power consumption was much less. I could sometimes see figures like 0.50A, 0.60A. This is with T9400, intel 4500 graphics, 2GB ram, 80GB Hitachi 5400 hdd, idle + wifi + the "Maximum Battery Life" profile in Power Manager.

Having put in 4GB DD3 in total, 500 GB Samsung 5400 hdd, installing fresh copy of Vista Ultimate and all the power management software from Lenovo:
intel chipset drivers,
lenovo interface driver
power management driver
thinkvantage power manager (I don't have the default profiles that my laptop had when it came with preinstalled OS)

with exactly the same settings ( Maximum Battery Life ) I can't get even close to 0.80A.

I really think that there has to be sth special in those lenovo power profiles that makes your computer easy on battery

PS: A - ampere. You all know that, right ?

 

I was under the assumption that RMClock was just multiplying the same (or similar) volt and amp values as found in the power manager. Anyways, I seem to be getting from .65amps to 1amp depending on cpu usage/rmclock/the moon/who knows what else.

whoa... I just noticed that lenovo power manager has a Wattage readout now too.... it didn't earlier today for me! Maybe it was the chipset drivers I reinstalled (or maybe I just didn't scroll down). Reporting 11 at the lowest, like RMClock.

edit: Just as an interesting side note, I noticed that my 4-cell battery is Panasonic and my 9-cell is Sanyo.

 

Maximum battery savings, everything that can be turned off:


and this is for the comparison with NBR:

T9400
internal graphics
5400rpm power hungry 500GB Samsung M6
Vista
4GB ram
Wifi on

 

zachman123, you might want to read this:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=303936&referrerid=188356

 

zachman- try turning off rmclock. i found that it INCREASED my wattage use by about 3 watts. word.

 

I'm not even using rmclock and im on max battery life and battery stretch ia on. im using 9/15 which is 60% brightness and i dont know y but its using 11.8W. never did a clean reinstall just using what came with the laptop. what would i need to do to lower it even more?

edit: im also using a p8400 which supposedly uses less power than 9400s?
+3gigs of ram

 

i get 13 watts with 60% brightness and on integrated

 

all the people who get bad wattege, what wifi card do you have? I think the intel 5100/5300 are more efficient

 

i have 5300

 

10.5W minimum on P8600 2GB XP SP3, 60% brightness but the rest in battery stretch mode, integrated graphics, 5300wireless

how I can drop it, like some people report, to 8.5W, I would like to find out

 

Might not be possible to get much lower on XP... all of the 8W results were on vista I believe.

I'm able to get mine around 8-9W (browsing web/word processing) now on vista 32, but I still have a weird graphics issue where sometimes it'll consume 30W until I turn on and off discrete graphics. I thought the new graphics driver would fix it but I guess not. Maybe I'll reinstall with vista 64 and see if that works better for some reason.

 

OT:
When Vista reports 9 hours - is it accurate?
Because those estimated battery hours left till shutdown is always way off in XP, at least with my experience.

 

Dumpduck, in case of Lenovo/IBM it is not a bs. Because the power manager makes that prediction based on readings from the battery. So, in case you installed all the power management/interface drivers from lenovo - yes it is accurate, in fact very accurate. It doesn't matter for operating system as long as you use the readouts of power manager and you have all the drivers.

 

btw, I set the charge thresholds of the battery as 21% to 37%. So, with 33%(light on accu) I still get 2+ hours of work with wireless on downloading torrents(read/write to hdd) with 60% with 12 brightness.

 

I'm currently averaging 0.75A, with CPU at lowest, 60% screen, Wireless ON & Active protection.

Try those settings and see what you get for current draw.

I am at 40% on my 9-cell and still have 3:30 minutes to go!

 

LGt400

screen.9.wifi.on.cd.off.maxbattery
here you go:

 

The Thinkpad b/g card (atheros) uses 2 watts more power when _disabled_ than the 5300, crazy.