Battery performance FW13 AMD with new 2.8K Screen

Framework Laptop 13
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Hey everyone

I’m looking to buy an AMD FW13 with the new 2.8K display and the 7840U. I figured, the new Intel Core Ultra chips don’t really matter to me, since performance under linux does not appear to be that much different (?) and this is not very important to me anyway.

What is important to me is battery life. As I’m looking to buy the FW13 with the new display, I wonder, what difference it makes in terms of battery life compared to the older 2256 x 1504 60Hz matte display.

As I’m not that experienced in terms of hardware, I have a hard time estimating this. Does someone have any insights on this?

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Hi and welcome to the forum.

Nice question :slight_smile: but unlike an OLED it only uses a backlight, so the number of pixels would make no difference. It could be 1 or a billion

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Ah, thanks! The OLED thing is exactly what happened when I bought my current device. I went for the OLED screen and my battery performance is horrible because of it :frowning:

Good to know that this won’t be an issue then!

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Looking at the title: :slight_smile:

You still may have an issue with the new AMD with 2.8 Screen but caused by screen in the sense I mentioned. You never know what else is under the hood.

take care

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The new display has VRR, which is supposed to improve battery life. It’s not just a resolution bump.

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There are a several caveats:

  1. Higher resolution means more work for your graphics card.
  2. Higher pixel requires a stronger backlight (more stuff in front of the backlight).
  3. More pixels means more pixels to control. Not even close to the power requirements of the backlight, but still a factor.
  4. If you use Linux, VRR support is hit and miss, mostly miss. Hopefully it’ll improve drm/amd/display: Do cursor programming with rest of pipe · torvalds/linux@66eba12 · GitHub lands? Maybe? But at least one Mesa dev has expressed the opinion that adaptive sync only exists for games, so I’m not holding my breath.
  5. The current panel supports PSR so I’m not sure how much VRR will help (but I’m hardly an expert on this).
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I think you will need to check actual benchmarks:

  • VRR might drop power consumption
  • Backlight changes might make this more efficient at low brightness or not
  • higher resolution might cause your GPU to push more pixels, which might increase power consumption depending on what you do

That sounds like a lot of variables, which I’d say makes any guesses unreliable. Actually measuring whole system power consumption with the old and the new panel at similar desktop element sizes is probably required to make an accurate statement about how it affects power consumption.

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Higher refresh rate (120Hz) could increase your GPU usage.

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Anyone have this combo that can report on Linux battery life? I have the 7840U which I upgrade the chassis and hinges on a while ago, and have recently upgraded the battery. Wonder what bat life would be like on Fedora with this new screen.

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It won’t ship till August.

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(post deleted by author)

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good to know

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Lol, my thread got merged, which is why it looks like I posted a nonsensical (and now deleted) question.

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So the screen is out now, hopefully we’ll get some answers soon.

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Latest review comparing Ultra Series to 13th Gen, including battery.

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Thanks! While this is interesting, it doesn’t compare the standard to the high refresh rate screens directly.