I have been using a 45W charger for the last few weeks, and the battery life on my laptop seems to have gotten worse. Using blender with a few spheres depletes 70% of my battery in an hour, and playing resource-intensive web games takes up around the same amount in an hour. Is this because of my charger, or is this just normal behaviour?
EDIT: I am asking about this behaviour when not plugged into the wall.
(I don’t use the 60W charger because I have a compact 45W one with two ports.)
Most likely because of your charger. 45W would be fine for light work/browsing or intermittent heavy workloads. (Looking at least up to 30W for CPU + 30W for GPU under heavy load).
Sustained workloads, especially running blender or resource-intensive web games may very well push the total system power requirements over 45W and start draining the battery.
You would be best served by a 65W or greater charger. Also keep in mind your 45W charger with two ports may not output 45W to one port but say 30W to one and 15W to the other, even if only one port is in use.
Edit: I didn’t see the intel in the original post. Crossed out.
70% in an hour with a 55Wh battery means 38.5W coming out of the battery, that’s quite a lot given the power limits of around 30W + overhead and the rest of the laptop that sounds like the charger is doing allmost nothing. That is of course asuming the battery is in good health.
Almost certainly. I am actually doubting the charger is doing 45W in your case, are you using both ports and do you know how the power sharing between the 2 ports work? There are multi port chargers that revert to 5v only when more than a single port is used which would give you <15W, enough to keep it happy under low load but nowhere near enough to supply it under load.
I was using my FW13 Batch 1 11th Gen Intel recently with Microsoft Flight Simulator, 45 Watt Single Port Samsung Adapter connected.
Near the end of the two hour flight, I started to get low battery messages.
45 Watts is clearly not enough to support high usage applications long term.
Fortunately, I landed the simulated plane before the battery died
If there’s doubt about what the upstream power supply is providing – at least for my AMD version of the motherboard under Gentoo, with lm-sensors installed (Arch’s equivalent should be lm_sensors?), running the sensors command while the Linux ucsi_acpi module is loaded should output what your USB-C PD source is supplying. In this example below, I can confirm that there is indeed a 20v, 5a (100W) external adapter plugged in:
amdgpu-pci-c100
Adapter: PCI adapter
vddgfx: 1.27 V
vddnb: 859.00 mV
edge: +43.0°C
PPT: 23.20 W (avg = 9.22 W)
mt7921_phy0-pci-0100
Adapter: PCI adapter
temp1: +30.0°C
ucsi_source_psy_USBC000:002-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
in0: 20.00 V (min = +5.00 V, max = +0.40 V)
curr1: 5.00 A (max = +3.56 A)
nvme-pci-0200
Adapter: PCI adapter
Composite: +36.9°C (low = -5.2°C, high = +89.8°C)
(crit = +93.8°C)
ucsi_source_psy_USBC000:004-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
in0: 0.00 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +0.00 V)
curr1: 0.00 A (max = +0.00 A)
ucsi_source_psy_USBC000:003-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
in0: 0.00 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +0.00 V)
curr1: 0.00 A (max = +0.00 A)
ucsi_source_psy_USBC000:001-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
in0: 0.00 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +0.00 V)
curr1: 3.00 A (max = +0.00 A)
BAT1-acpi-0
Adapter: ACPI interface
in0: 15.92 V
curr1: 0.00 A
Note also that the final entry above, the BAT1-acpi-0, which should be present if you have the kernel battery module loaded. It will show a nonzero current both when the battery is charging or discharging. Unfortunately, it’s not obvious from that output which is going on, but if you have the acpi application (from the Arch package of the same name) installed, running it will indicate whether the battery is currently charging or discharging.
Discharging:
Battery 0: Discharging, 59%, 02:02:30 remaining
And charging:
Battery 0: Charging, 59%, 01:05:06 until charged
Coupling that information with the output of sensors, you can tell how many mA are being drawn (or charged), and figure out if (and if so, how badly) your power supply is undersized.
I see there’s been an edit to stipulate “while not plugged into the wall.”
That’s going to depend on your initial charge (and whether your battery is starting partially discharged), as well as the load.
sensors will still indicate the amperage draw while disconnected. acpi -b -i will give the battery design information. For example, playing video and spinning up all my cores to try and put maximum drain on my system, I see:
BAT1-acpi-0
Adapter: ACPI interface
in0: 14.13 V
curr1: 3.14 A
from sensors, and:
Battery 0: Discharging, 50%, 00:32:57 remaining
Battery 0: design capacity 3572 mAh, last full capacity 3433 mAh = 96%
from acpi -b -i. It would make sense that at a draw of 3140 mA, with a design capacity of 3572 mAh, and a battery currently at 50%, that I should be able to run an estimated half hour to flat. Note however that the voltage will go down, and the current draw will go up (in order to keep supplying the same wattage to the system), as the battery discharges.
Your system will have a different draw than mine. Put it under load, and see what that draw is, then calculate what the battery life “should” be, and compare it against what you’re actually getting. In my specific case, I could run my system from full to flat in an hour if I was really taxing it, even if the battery were in perfect health.
So you are complaining that draining the battery drains the battery?
If you want it to use less turn down the power limit on battery but you’ll of course also get less performance (tough probably not as much less as the power draw cause the performance/w curve isn’t flat).
Not really. The battery is draining a lot more than usual if I remember correctly. The odd thing is that this is happening after I have started using a 45W charger.
After using the same charger for about a week, it seems that the battery is back to normal again. I don’t know if it was Linux, a bad app update, or the battery glitching out, but everything seems fine now.
