Battery on gaming laptop goes down too fast

fooball

Estimable
Jun 14, 2014
33
0
4,590
I'm use my Eurocom M3 (same as Clevo w230st and Sager np7330) gaming laptop for school work, and I always have to plug it in. The battery life goes down 0.1% every 10 seconds.
I installed the BatteryBar toolbar today, and it says capacity=51,770; discharge rate= -15,954; full runtime= 2:49; Battery Wear= 16.7% of 62,160 mWh.
The websites advertise it as "up to 5 hours with 62mwh battery", yet I feel like I am getting 2:30 hours on lowest brightness and power saver while web browsing (with ~9 tabs).

Specs: intel i7 4700mq, 12gb ddr3 ram, gtx 765m, 1x7200rpm hdd, 1x msata ssd

How can I increase battery life?
PS: I currently lowered the dynamic cpu voltage offset in intel XTU.

Thanks
 
I have had a dozen or so high end Clevo's and one I'm typing from also has a 765M.... unplugged i get about 90 minutes. What you are seeing is entirely normal.... remember ads are written by marketing departments .... you can possibly get that time but only if you crank every setting down to minimum. You have some pretty powerful hardware in there and 90 minutes at "typical" settings is normal.

You also should be properly caring for your battery in accordance with Clevo instructions. Just about all battery guides contradict themselves. While you don't want to be letting your battery get close to 0 often because that increases wear.... you do need to calibrate the battery once every 30 discharge cycles. When charging the control scheme sends the highest voltage when beginning and as it gets closer to full charge it tapers off the voltage. When off calibration, the battery charging circuit will continue to send the higher voltage well past when it should be tapering down which also reduces battery life.

So to balance between the two conflicting "bets practices", you should let the battery full discharge every 30 cycles..... Going from 50% to 100% is a "half cycle"... going from 90% to 100% id 1/10th of a cycle. Download the utility and read the guide here. It will take all the guesswork out of bettery management:

http://batterycare.net/en/guide.html
http://batterycare.net/en/download.html
 

fooball

Estimable
Jun 14, 2014
33
0
4,590
Thanks for the response. I will learn from what you mentioned about discharging the battery. I was wondering, would it be possible to lower the power consumption of the cpu? It does use alot of power, and sometimes I would definitely sacrifice power for battery life. Is this possible?