Gaming on battery power Issues

briandr

Distinguished
Jan 21, 2008
12
0
18,560
Hi all, i recently bought an ASUS M50VM laptop from newegg. it has a 9600m gs. so far i have been very impressed with the gaming capability of this laptop. its nothing outstanding but its a laptop so i wasnt expecting to much.

today i tried to play a game on battery power for the first time and the graphics card never kicked out of idle. it just sat at 170/100(gpu/mem), instead of 430/400. this is my first laptop with a dedicated graphics card so im kind of lost.

i have the latest drivers available from laptopvideo2go.com, i have looked in the nvidia controll panel and have not seen any sort of option or anything. power plan is set to high performance.


brian
 

frozenlead

Distinguished
Gaming notebooks aren't designed to run on batteries playing games.

Compare the wattage of your power supply to that of your battery. You'll find your battery is a heck of a lot weaker.

The computer can't supply the power to clock the GPU at full while on batteries. Don't even try.
 

cjl

Distinguished
Jun 18, 2008
432
0
18,940
The graphics card isn't supposed to kick out of idle on battery, regardless of the demand. My XPS M1710 scores 5300 in 3dmark06 on wall power, and 1102 on battery for example. Not only that, but when I try to play a game on battery, I have perhaps 45mins of battery, max. They really aren't meant for any gaming on battery power.
 
Normally, if you want to game while on the battery, you need to go into the NV control panel and turn PowerMizer off. Not really sure why that option isn't showing in your controls though. Could always try a different driver version, try looking for one that was released specifically for Asus laptops so you don't have to mess with the .INF files.
 

briandr

Distinguished
Jan 21, 2008
12
0
18,560
thanks - lostandwandering

i was able to find powermizer in the registry and disable it, seems to be working great. went from 5-20 fps in COD4 to 20-50. so far i havnt noticed any overheating but i will try and keep an eye on the battery.
 


Glad you were able to find it. You may also see some gains if you disable SpeedStep, but that might also cause heating issues since I'm not sure how Asus has the fans set up to work.

edit: you will see a very noticeable drop in battery life from the combination of these.
 

briandr

Distinguished
Jan 21, 2008
12
0
18,560
im not planning on disabling speedstep, the computer seems to do a pretty good job of regulating the speed. if i do end up needing a little more speed i might, so far temps have not been a problem, cpu is usualy 33/48 and gpu is usualy 46/68 (idle/load)

as for the powermizer, it still downclocks the graphics card when not running a 3d app so normal battery life is still excellent, when gaming i get about 1/3 normal battery life(from 3hrs down to about 1)



 

briandr

Distinguished
Jan 21, 2008
12
0
18,560
i was referring to the 3hr being excellent...... but i still dont consider 1 hour of battery life bad when both the cpu and cpu are running at nearly 100%.