I wouldn’t necessarily trust any measurements of the display power, there’s no sensor there to measure it. I’d recommend playing with different brightness levels and measuring it yourself.
I also wanted to post an update on how I’m seeing a recent issue with KDE Plasma’s kwin platform that’s drawing a ton of extra power. I’m temporarily using lxqt right now, and my average power draw for text editing is at 6.7W.
I wanted to share a finding of mine. Having switched to LXQT with mutter as my window manager, my power draw has become incredibly consistent. Instead of bouncing between 7W and 10W like I was on Plasma, I am instead bouncing between 6.7W and 6.75W. I saw one spike to 6.8W once. That equates to 12.6hrs of battery life. It doesn’t have all the fancy gaming features I liked about Plasma 6.2+, but for my work use cases the consistent and long lasting battery life is amazing. I don’t know anymore if I’ll be going back to Plasma once I figure out how to resolve the power-draw bug my install currently has.
One annoying thing about this is the palm-rejection/disable touchpad while typing doesn’t work out of the box, and considering all I do is type it’s actually quite annoying. Thankfully, synclient touchpadoff=1 allows me to work around that for the moment.
If anyone is interested in battery above all else, I recommend giving LXQT + mutter a chance (other window managers seem to draw more power).
I’ve gotten down to 7 watts on Windows 11, airplane mode, lowest screen brightness, 60hz, etc. Note this is monitored use HWINFO64 so perhaps even lower without the continuous monitoring. I normally idle around 9-11 watts on normal Windows use, browser open, MS Teams, HWINFO64, 165hz, normal-high brightness, BT + Wifi, etc. Some food for thought.
Edit: I received my no-DGPU expansion bay, I’ll put that in and try again. I should have also mentioned my CPU is the 7840hs variant.
I think this may be the first Windows submission we’ve seen so far, and it’s a pretty good one too! I wouldn’t be surprised if airplane mode actually helps significantly on Windows as it essentially forces the various background process at work to not do anything.
Thanks for sharing.
That’s on par with our best linux scores. Thanks for sharing!
