Getting 5 hour battery life average

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Hey y’all,

I have been on a long investigation of trying to get my battery life to be longer. Both on Windows and Linux I get 5 hours no matter what. Light web browsing, watching YouTube and even doing nothing. I contacted Framework support too and they said that 5 hours is normal when watching YouTube which does make sense but I’m getting it just no matter what

So if anyone has any advice on what I should do I’d appreciate it

I recently switched to Kubuntu as my daily driver but also have Windows 11 installed. Both have about the same battery life

Pretty much the only thing I do is run Waterfox (Firefox fork) and that’s all. Sometimes I have Discord and Spotify open but I’ve been leaving them closed lately

My last resort is just replacing the battery entirely which I’m trying to avoid unless I feel that it is actually not preforming well

If anyone has any advice I’d appreciate it

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What system specs do you have?

Sometimes to squeeze some more battery life out of my Lenovo Laptop with a Ryzen 7730U running an arch based distro, I just disable half of my CPU cores. This reduces power draw from around 9W to 6W.

Also make sure to enable battery saver and set your performance modes in both linux and windows to power efficiency.

You can report back if any of these fixes are able to do anything.

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My specs are as follows:

Laptop 13 Ryzen 5 7640U

Crucial 32GB DDR5 5600

Samsung 970 Evo 1tb

I’ve tried leaving power saving on but it doesn’t seem to do much. My battery does last a while but not as much as I’d hope. My power usage seems to sit at 7-8w idle at least on Kubuntu

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Yeah, unfortunately it seems like 5 hours is the expected battery life for the FW 13 AMD. If you are willing, then you can disable some cores to save even more battery life. Just keep in mind that this is temporary and will reset upon a restart. I have tried using cpupower / cpupower-gui but it doesn’t work so I have to use nano to change the state of the cores one by one. This might give you a bit more battery life at the cost of performance.

My FW13 AMD laptop (61Wh battery) can last 11hr+, technically. If I'm doing anyt... | Hacker News.

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That sounds way high unless you absolutely blast the display brightness, then again ubuntu is probably on a very old kernel, lots of improvements happened lately, especially to video playback power consumption.

That sounds like one of the worst way to achieve that particular goal, reducing power would be a better idea if you really want to kneecap it but that’s also not that necessary since the cpu cores themselves are stupidly efficient (you can still sw decode 720p 24fps for less power than the hw decoder uses but they managed to almost close that gap recently).

There were a lot of impactful fixes especially to video playback lately that help so being on a recent kernel with hardware this new is the way to get the pest performance/efficiency out of it.

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5 hours sounds about normal for YouTube, but if you’re getting that with just browsing, maybe try adjusting power settings or switching to a lighter browser.

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Wh, capacity is measured in Wh (or joules I guess), W is power and W per hour is a rate of change.

With the latest kernel I get about 7w for 720p youtube playback in firefox at 20% brigtness and around 4w idle.

Windows is still better at using the hw decoders for less power but cancels it out by being windows and doing a ton of random crap in the background.

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@ThatOneGuy I think it’s your SSD! I recently bought a SAMSUNG 990 EVO SSD 2TB and it ruined my battery life! I recommend switching that out and seeing if battery life is improved.

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Hmm. You think it could be? I thought a 970 evo was supposed to be pretty efficient. Well I suppose I could test it. Any recommendations for an SSD?

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I believe SK Hynix is quite known for the efficiency in their drives, so you could try checking out the P41 Platinum from them.

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I’m currently using a WD_BLACK SN770 500GB and it has been very efficient for me.

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With the 7840 and 2.8k screen on Windows I get sub <3w idle (no programs open, lowest brightness, tried it for a couple 25 min tests). With firefox and possibly obsidian open I seem to often get 4.5-6W maybe? But it can be higher depending on what I’m doing. Running 720p60 video full screen it seemed to be about 9.5w.

I had the 11th gen previously and I believe it may have been a bit lower power usage on average (<5w often for same tasks), but admittedly it also had less RAM and a different ssd. What I will say is that Windows on AMD started out using much higher power (it was getting overly warm even when sleeping if I recall) before settings changes, default windows settings would seem poorly optimized.

Since you asked for advice, some general suggestions might be on windows to set task scheduler to stop running potentially high energy tasks when on battery (memory diagnostics, windows update, defender), disable services you don’t need (indexing, amongst others), disable all startup programs, also there are a lot of power options that are potentially hidden (may depend on version), but there are scripts to make them all visible and then you can go through them and start making changes (at your own risk).

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