NP8130 Battery Life?

Curious about the battery life of the NP8130? Assuming mid screen brightness, wi-fi on, just basic web browsing and general tasks, what kind of battery life are you getting? Thanks.

 

3 hours at 25% brightness, wifi on, and working.

 

I posted the results of my battery life test using BatteryBar last week in another thread but here were my results with normal usage (web browsing and chatting):

Full Brightness: 15min to drain 10% = 2hrs and 30 minutes
Medium Brightness: 17min to drain 10% = 2hrs and 50 minutes
Low Brightness*: 18min to drain 10% = 3hrs

*Note: One bar above the lowest setting because the lowest setting is very dim and I doubt I could ever browse comfortably in that condition.

So in conclusion, it looks like I can get anywhere between 2.5 - 3hrs of battery life with normal usage depending on the settings, which seems to be the average.

 

Great info, thanks for posting it up!

 

ht you should have bought just the shell and transferred the parts from your p170. and then sold the shell.

 

I don't think the shell would have earned me $550.

 

yeah but you would have 485m, and you could get the 8130 plastic finish. sorry the shell and motherboard. with my current rig i still get around 3 hours while using the web on wifi with min brightness, brightness maxed while playing netflix on the performance power was still 2 and a half hours.

 

more input is greatly appreciated. And who's the goofball that chose 6+ hours!?

 

that would be me because I just wanted to view the poll and chose the most absurd choice to not skew with the real results. =P

 

you can view the results without voting. Just click view poll results.

 

4 hours playing minecraft half brightness.

 

Good point both ways. I should have put an option "just looking" or something to that effect.

 

I get 6 hours.


When plugged in.

 

I just got my NP8130 today. After installing Windows and configuring the machine, I let it idle for a bit for SSD garbage collection and Windows do their cleanup work. Then I did a web browsing test, and only got 2.5 hours. LCD @ 10% brightness, balanced power plan.

Wondering how to get 4 hours playing minecraft!?

 

lower the resolution to 800x600 and use no scaling, turn off the numpad light/ scroll lock

edit: 512 posts, lol thats how many mb my third hard drive was!

 

Lol. Not sure if you're kidding or serious.

The CPU is still running at like 50% performance and GPU at 10% so not sure what you'd gain from running at 800x600. Backlight is still running for the full screen which draws the most power, and LCD itself draws only about 1W as it is.

And yeah, 512MB. lol. I remember buying an 80MB hard drive for $200 and thinking I got a deal. It was great though for my Amiga 500 that ran off 3.5" floppies otherwise. I could actually boot up in two minutes instead of five! lol.

 

im not joking about the resolution, it helps reduce the amount of processing power and gpu power needed to run, as well as lowering the memory requirements. also if you are outside while using it, turn the backlight all the way off, and use the sun to light up the screen, like an old gameboy, except it doesn't work nearly as well, and you can barely read the text.

also is it possible to underclock the gpu in the low state?

 

LOL. Outside you can't use the sun, it's not a transflective display, although I always wondered why they didn't do something like this. You will need full brightness outside. I took it outside today and it wasn't even full sun and I still had to crank up brightness most of the way. I don't believe you can underclock the GPU either, and not sure you'd want to. It's already at GT 210m levels lol. I would test it at lower resolution but don't want to blow through my battery with too many battery tests. Plus I still can't see an OpenGL app like Minecraft running at 800x600 even taking a lot less power (like 40% less) than Windows desktop and a web browser window. But to test the theory I do have a watt meter and may measure power draw at different resolutions and Aero off, etc, and see if anything helps.

 

you can lower the gpu i did, and im trying to find the limit. i went all the way down to the minimum 25mhz on the shader clock and then all the way down to 40mhz on the memory clock and it was still stable, if the mem clock goes lower it will turn the cursor into the mario version of frosted mini wheats.

 

Please, create an illustrative gif animation! XD

 

ill take a picture with my phone! better yet a video.

 

Go into power options, click on the plan you're using and then choose "change advanced settings" Look for PCI Express --> Link State Power Management, and on battery, you want to set that to maximum power savings. On balanced, it should be on moderate by default. Then go to Processor Power Management and make sure that the system cooling policy is set to "passive" on battery. Desktop slideshow should not be available on battery; might help a little. Wireless adapter settings, maximum savings, etc you get the trend. Unless something's totally starved for power and you're not getting desirable working conditions, then raise its allowances.

I think that's it, try and see what you get on battery now. If you still get 2.5 hours only, well... *shrugs*. That's all I can think of that would help XD.

Also, your screen isn't that bright you say, is it glossy or matte?

 

I just checked and everything was set as you described, well wi-fi on medium power savings just because low requires you to be like 10 feet from the router before it drops off rapidly.

The screen is plenty bright, I use it one notch above minimum (using fn keys). At minimum it's too dim, and only consumes less than 0.5W more with it bumped up to the 10 or 20% level. I have the 95% matte screen.

I think part of it may have been because of a new install of Windows I didn't let the SSD idle long enough to do TRIM cleanup (i.e. garbage collection), and it can consume considerably more power. However SSD consumes only about 0.5 idle, but 3.0W cleanup, but even so 2.5W difference is only about 10-15% of the 22-25W shown as being consumed by BatteryBar, which would amount to 150 mins x 0.1 = 15-20 mins improvement at best.

Also, I could only get the nVidia drivers on the Sager driver disk to install. The ones from nVidia's website said it couldn't find a compatible device.

 

These have support for the 560M out of the box.

 

Great suggestions, my first thought was one you didn't mention. Did you set the min / max processor state to something aggressive while on battery? Maybe like 5% min 50% max?

Don't torture yourself too much HTWingNut! I know you've been excited about this system for a while!

 

I don't have my 8130 yet, but I'm going to try this when I get it, as it's what I normally have to do with my new notebooks:

Latest official release:
NVIDIA DRIVERS 275.33 WHQL

LaptopVideo2Go INF to overwrite yours, in the temp directory the nvidia drivers extracted to:
Drivers | laptopvideo2go.com

Then run the setup again.

[Links above are for 64 bit]

 

Thanks, that did the trick! +1

Good suggestion. Problem is when browsing it pretty much stays at 800MHz CPU speed, and only spikes to 1.3GHz when refreshing a page for a second. At 50% I see CPU doesn't exceed 1GHz though. Worth a shot I guess.

 

Hmm... I just scanned the modded .INF and don't actually see the GTX560m, not sure that would work. Furthermore, even LaptopVideo2Go's newer links to drivers are currently broken right now so I can't scan them to see.

 

I just posted a link to where you can get drivers that support the 560M without a modified .inf. Look about 5 posts above this one.

 

Yeah, I saw that, sorry. Was just completing my thoughts for reference of anyone seeing what I posted. Thanks!

 

Ah, I didn't think the CPU would have jumped up to anywhere near the maximum state, so I left it as defaulted. My notebook carries an i7-950, it only downclocks to 1/2 speed anyway, so I'm not familiar with setting the min/max CPU states and having them actually *work* XD.
I just know that's how I set up peoples' laptops for them to get better battery life, never had a complaint so far, so I figured it must be working right.

 

I dunno. I've reduced power everywhere I can and at best I might get 3 hours life out of it. Even with screen at minimum brightness.

 

Well see if you can get that SSD to do that garbage cleanup, 15 mins of battery life is all my current battery pushes out, so... tack that onto yours and you've got yourself a keeper! =D

 

I don't know what to do about it. I don't know if my battery is faulty or something else is causing a high drain, but it's running ~ 25000 mW, sometimes 30000 mW just idling on power saver profile, with CPU set to 5-50% (800-1000MHz max) in power options. Left system monitor run for a bit and CPU was essentially 0% the whole time too.

Also, after it was fully charged, I shut down, unplugged it and set it somewhere for the day. I plugged it back in, started it up, and battery had discharged 2.8% when I know it was at 100% before I shut down.

Has anyone heard of an issue where a battery drains 2-3% over the course of a day while the laptop it completely turned off?

Not that we have much data here but 10 users get 2-3 hours, and 4 users get 3.5-4 hours, that's a 70%/30% split. No matter what I do I can't get more than 3. I even let it idle for an hour minimum screen brightness (screen turned off after 20 mins actually), and said max life is 3:19. I trust battery bar, been using it for a couple of years now on a few different laptops and after a couple discharges it is remarkably accurate. I've already had one full discharge and a couple half ones which is more than enough to get within 10%.

 

at 2 hours I am down to 22%. I figure I can go another 20 minutes or so?? it's not very good battery life!

 

Yeah, I guess I got my hopes up with people stating 3-3.5. If I could easily reach 3.5 I'd be sold, but hard to live with 2.5 just isn't quite going to cut it. But the performance and everything else about the laptop is phenomenal imho. Sitting along side my NP8130 is the HP DV6z that costs ~ $500 less, and thinking that 90% of what I'm going to do with my laptop is basic web and desktop tasks with occasional gaming, I may stick with the DV6z. But it has issues of its own. Sigh. Why can't anyone make the perfect laptop. To be honest I'd gladly pay what I did for the NP8130 if it got 4.5-5 hours real battery life. Damn you Sager for not implementing switchable graphics!

 

I get 3.5 hours in windows, CPU max use 0% and min brightness + Wifi. Mine has a 460m though.

 

3.5 hours, hmmm. With power saver, CPU max use 50% is only at 1000MHz instead of 800MHz, min brightness + wi-fi is about 2.5 hours with web browsing and a little youtube/flash. The thing is the 560m was supposed to be more efficient, but by that I guess they just meant more performance per Watt, but used more power!

I guess even with technology today we're still split between performance and battery life.

 

are u able to browse at normal speeds if you set the wireless card to medium or maximum power savings, in the advanced power options?? I have to have my always set to Maximum Performance, or it is so slow it's like dial up or worse. I've never owned any PC that did that. don't know what to make of such a quirk.

 

I am able to browse just fine at medium power savings, but max power savings it slows to a crawl.

Just did a realistic run to test battery life, power saver on (aero off), min brightness, medium wi-fi power, and at 10% left went about 2:25 mins, BatteryBar says 2:38 maximum life. Not sure how others are really getting over 3 hours, let alone 3.5 or more. You would have to run at less than 20000 mW (20W) consistently to get that.

 

Yeah I'm not sure how people are getting anything near 3, 3.5 with the quads.... I'm on a dual core and did a battery run as well.. I got 3.5 hours flat on almost 0% battery... with lowest brightness and wifi on browsing with multiple tabs and steam open....

 

Realistically, the difference between the quadcore and dualcore processors in terms of power is slim when idling. The max TDP between say, the 2520m and the 2720qm is only 10w (35w versus 45w). Unless you're running them at full speed, they're designed to downclock and idle at much lower thresholds.

That's not to say that there aren't lots of other factors at play either- just that the CPU ends up being such a small difference overall, maybe 1-2 watts between dual and quad at idle.

 

hmm have you tried disabling all of the cores except for one, disabling hyper threading and lowering the low power state gpu clocks? i was able to lower the clocks on my 485m to almost null and it was stable. i will try disabling cores to see if it helps.

 

Gah, if I have to go through all that just to eek another 20 minutes of battery life, forget it. And I didn't think you could disable cores? I did lower clocks on GPU but it made only less than 1W difference. It's already only running at about IGP performance. If it got a solid 3.5 hours with little fuss, I'd be possibly ok. With the DV6z that I also have, it undervolts very stable, and looking like I can get close to ten hours battery life with regular use, with 9-cell battery. If I had known that I would have opted for the high capacity 6-cell instead and cut down a little on the weight and battery bulge, but that bulge does help with lifting the back end up for typing and cooling.

 

yeah to disable cores you just go to msconfig, and set the number of cores, and then reboot.

 

Running with both 1 or 2 cores only improved battery life 10 minutes tops. Hardly a perceivable difference. Sigh. I think the problem is on battery the system is already as close to efficient as it can get, and usually don't tax it much, so it's more or less at idle most of the time.

 

I have no idea how some people are getting 6 or more hours. Everything must be off, disabled, cores disabled, only one ram stick, SSD instead of harddrive, wifi never on, very low intensity programs, etc. to get 6 hours of the battery.

 

Oh those 6 hours are people that didn't want to click "see poll results" and just chose 6 so it'd show up. I added the bottom option later. So the 6 hours is not accurate.

In any case 3.5 to 4 hours is crazy too. I'd be happy with that actually.

 

it seems like the lowest my machine will draw at anytime is 20 Watts. and its not stable, it jumps between 20w and 25w, maybe if you had a core i3 and the lower clocked RAM, a usb stick instead of hard drive, nothing in the optical drive, and modded the screen to be reflective so it would run without the backlight. then added a few solar panels you would be good.

ooh just thought of an idea, a usb solar panel, that could recharge the battery.