Why 1060 laptops get significantly more battery life than 1070MQ laptops ?

A 1060 laptop with 8th gen cpu and a 144Hz screen(46Whr battery). XMG neo 15


A 1070MQ laptop with 8th gen cpu and a 144Hz screen(55Whr). XMG KEY 15


Why is the P955 battery life smaller despite having the larger battery ?

The difference in TDP is 78W(1060) vs 80W(1070MQ) so even the difference in load doesn't seem right

Might be worth looking into

 

• The 1070 chassis' cooling solution may itself draw more power
• The 1060 may not be running full tilt for some reason (e.g. worse cooling -- my Quanta 1060 laptop would throttle under load because the GPU would readily get up over 70c, whereas my P955ER stays nice and cool and can run full tilt for prolonged periods)
• Different power restrictions (max turbo power/time limit, Energy Performance Preference) may be applied to the processors by the BIOS and/or pack-in software, which can significantly alter power usage both at idle and under load
• Were the "idle" tests done with whatever pack-in software comes on the laptop running in the background? Differences in CPU usage by pack-in software may make a difference here -- I've seen Clevo Control Center take up dumb amounts of background CPU for instance
• Drives and other peripherals can make a significant battery life difference
• The 1070 has another RAM chip or two whose power usage is not accounted for in the TDP figure for the GPU you're quoting
• Basal power usage of motherboards can vary pretty widely (from less than 20W to over 50W)

I think you'd need to compare an identical chassis in identical configuration with just the GPU switched, or compare averages across many models, to show that this is a consistent 1060 vs 1070MQ thing and not some other factor.

 

Guru fire ks(1060 last gen)

 

I'll copy and paste what I wrote to you beforehand:

In a nutshell, half broken optimus, power management, and features on the 1070 such as cuda cores which take watts compared to the 1060 are all factors for the battery life. Bloatware is also a thing depending on notebook model etc.

also comparing a 7700HQ and a 8750H is stupid to begin with, so ignore the guru.

 

I know that this isn't 100% the topic of the OP, but it goes with the different chassis being quoted and battery run time links from notebookcheck.

Compare the Guru system to this https://www.notebookcheck.net/Schenker-Technologies-Key-15-Clevo-P955HP6-Laptop-Review.284500.0.html - basically same chassis, same CPU, GPU, RAM, M.2 SSD. Only difference is 4K in the Key 15 1060 review version compared to FHD in the Guru review version. Power consumption on mains power is within the difference between FHD vs 4K panel. At idle 1W less gives you an extra hour battery runtime with a 55Wh battery at complete idle. What we don't know is how the battery performance is for each chassis - for example:

- ignore the "Idle (without WLAN, min brightness)" - this is down to the display resolution 6W vs 7W consumption and it's not real world
- NBC WiFi Websurfinf and Big Buck Bunny H.264 1080p - are they running at the same clock speed? We don't know if one laptop has manual battery power limit settings compared to the other being at default, this could account for the difference - i.e. performance on battery might be higher on one but the battery life would be lower.

 

Which means there are issues to fix(broken power management,half broken optimus). The 1070MQ shouldn't be activated during video/web browsing.

Maybe you should set optimus general settings to intel HD(instead of auto select), while manually setting your games for the 1070MQ

Notebookcheck battery life tests are standardized.

The laptop you linked battery life is still below the neo 15 which has a more power hungry CPU + 1080P@144HZ screen(should make up for the 4k screen on the one you linked) + a smaller battery.

Even so on paper the key 15 shouldn't lose to the neo 15.

 

exacly shouldn't be activated, but is getting activated, it's annoying and microsoft doesn't care to fix it. You apparently never had an optimus notebook, even when getting the setting to Intel HD only, somehow windows 10 forced the dGPU for no reason for a very short time. You can't stop it.

 

I have an optimus W10 laptop(a ****ty one but still). just started testing if setting it to intel HD will help my battery life

 

Now do basic stuff and monitor the dGPU, you'll notice it turns on and off for brief moments.

 

Anything with OpenCL calls will force the GPU open, even when the Nvidia CC is set otherwise. My Libreoffice install did this, before I turned off that functionality in Libreoffice.

 

Are you talking about how if you have e.g. Afterburner open it will "spike" every few seconds from all zeroes to the actual idle values? Monitoring the dGPU will cause the dGPU to pop on and off at intervals in and of itself, the way most of those programs are implemented, so you can kind of run into the observer effect there. In any case I noticed this same thing on early Dell Optimus laptops running W7 so it's not a W10 issue.

 

Nope, afterburner will "spike" because it needs to read the dGPU. there are tons of other features from W10 that forces the dGPU open despite setting otherwise, as Jeremy was confirming as well.

 

Exactly, afterburner will "spike" because it needs to read the dGPU which forces it to wake up at intervals.

Jeremy stated that a third party OpenCL application (e.g. one that calls GPU features only accessible on the dGPU) forced the GPU open, not a W10 feature.

 

He confirmed that despite setting the GPU to "intel HD only" it would still spike, W10 uses features that act exacly the same, even firefox does turn the dGPU on.

https://communities.intel.com/thread/119093

this was especially noticed when intel graphics would take a while to switch causing microlags.

 

I was comparing the Key 15 to the Guru, not to the Neo 15 ;-)

But yes, if we compare the Key 15 to the Neo 15 it shouldn't loose on paper, technically. But my point in comparing the above two laptops is that although as you say, the notebookcheck battery tests are standardised, are they extracting exactly the same performance from each CPU on battery power? The Neo 15 pulls more power than the Key 15 from PSU, but:

- at idle the Neo 15 has a slightly shorter battery life than you would expect when compared to the Key 15
- with any type of load, on battery power, the Neo 15 pulls less power. Does 2.2GHz vs 2.8GHz base clock alone account for this? Does the power efficiency of each chassis and EC battery power config differ (bearing in mind these two mainboards come from different manufacturers)????

 

This is why I used HWiNFO64 instead of Afterburner for monitoring, back when I had an Optimus system (P650SG). HWiNFO64 let the dGPU sleep properly instead of waking it up and polling periodically like Afterburner does. I was also using Windows 7, which probably helped as well since Windows 10 seems to have more Optimus issues (such as the 60 FPS cap that took ages to fix). I never saw my dGPU light come on unless I was running a 3D app.