[BATTERY] A topic about battery life

[Berend Niels Eissens]

• charge time is about 2/4 hours
• I use the stock charger and cable, its nice and thick and has very low resistance compared to a stock samsung cable
• I can get about 2 or 3 hours of battery life in windows, while browsing and listening to music with the screen on 25%
• I can get up to 1 or 1.5  hours in android
• I have no clue whatsoever to increase the battery life

Suggestion:

• Mod bios and disable certain thing,
• contact intel and ask for better drivers

[Hotaru Tachibana]

wow that battery life is so bad

i guess i have to cancel the order.

[Milosz]

Yes battery life i quiet poor …I really don’t believe that is 8000mah…. This tablet after 15 minutes go down form 100 to 92% (only 25% brightness and battery save mod) my old iPad 3 (battery aprox 11500mah) after 15 minutes of usage its still display 100% ….can’t compare this two devices with battery life…. IPad destroy teclast….and I don’t see big difference when I open web page-more and less is same but iPad is much fluent when scrolling web content (even edge is not that great)….I not gona even talk about sleep mod DRAIN

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[Berend Niels Eissens]

maybee, we can fit an ipad battery in

[Robert]

it has 8000mAh, but these new atoms are not very power efficient, especially their graphics. Maybe a new bios can fix it. For the sleep battery drain, in windows you can manually disable wifi, that helps a lot (it eats around 2% during whole night with wifi disabled), in android disabling wifi doesn’t help

[Dennis Perez]

Disabling turbo boost improves battery and lowers temps

[Hotaru Tachibana]

Dennis Perez wrote:

Disabling turbo boost improves battery and lowers temps

nice finding, how to get into setting to disable turbo boost?

[Chris G]

Wow your battery life is bad. When I had the Windows only bios, I could get just over 4 hours in Windows and that was gaming. Now on the new bios it’s even less and in Android around 2-3 hours. The new bios is not good for our battery life.

The issue with this tablet is the battery life, not the heating issue. That’s more minor.

 

Edit, I’m charging mine with a Blitzwolf 24W charger and a Surface 3 charging cable…

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[Berend Niels Eissens]

So the bios needs to be adjusted, but just how are we going to do that?

[Berend Niels Eissens]

i can try and learn, but i need the original k9c3 bios (non dualboot) and the new k9c6 bios, i’m thinking of comparing those and see what the diffrence is, i think this is a good first step

[Hotaru Tachibana]

Chris G wrote:

Wow your battery life is bad. When I had the Windows only bios, I could get just over 4 hours in Windows and that was gaming. Now on the new bios it’s even less and in Android around 2-3 hours. The new bios is not good for our battery life. The issue with this tablet is the battery life, not the heating issue. That’s more minor.

hi chris can you disable the turbo boost and see whether the battery life gets any better?

[Anonymous]

How do you even disable turbo boost?

[Anonymous]

Also i am all up for testing different settings to improve battery life since i am on the edge of selling the thing again to purchase something else.

[Shade]

I don’t have much good news to add except that by following the directions posted here I was able to get a decent list of power settings to mess with in advanced power settings. Couldn’t believe the tiny list of settings that were shown by default.

I didn’t need to set “Attributes” individually – I just set CsEnabled to 0 and all the settings that, I’m assuming, the x98 Pro supports were visible after reboot.

I haven’t had enough time with these settings other than to verify that they do what they say they do and drastically affect performance. I assume it will also affect battery life but I can’t yet guess how much.

My limited observations so far:

– Setting the display to 1024×768 makes an immediate difference in projected battery life. Driving that 4k screen around takes a lot of power. There are many resolutions to pick from if 768 is too cramped. All of my other observations were at this resolution.

– In the newly revealed advanced power settings, the Intel Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework settings make a HUGE difference in performance. Especially the Power Limit setting. High Performance is set to level 5 by default and that gives us the low battery, high performance that we’re familiar with. HWInfo reports the cores at the max 28x or 18x multipliers pretty much all the time. Dropping it to 4 made only a little difference: 2 of my 4 cores were still throttled while playing Skyrim for testing.

– Dropping that power level to 3 pretty much locks the cores into the low 6x multiplier and makes the device very sluggish. Playing Skyrim was nearly impossible but mundane tasks weren’t too bad. Load times for everything were noticeably longer but I’m sure the power consumption was MUCH lower. This is the default level of the “Balanced” profile. “Never Alone” was somewhat playable at this level (and at extremely low resolution – 800×600 if I recall) and it didn’t hit the thermal throttle.

– Enabling the “Low Power Mode Setting” keeps the machine idling at 6x instead of 28x even on the High Power profile. This is probably the simplest solution for the machine eating so much power even when it isn’t doing much. Gaming performance wasn’t affected and it overheated like it always does in my quick tests. Didn’t seem to affect normal use much.

– Changing the “Processor Power Management” max power to 90% didn’t do anything noticeable. On High Performance profile with max power at 90% Skyrim behaved about the same and all 4 cores hit the thermal ceiling. This setting has proved VERY useul to me in the past for squeezing every last drop of juice out of a low performance state, though. Could be helpful for extending the device’s battery life for normal use. I’ve dropped down to 25% with an i5 laptop I was using as a server of sorts. Worked. Not sure how well the Atom will handle that, though.

– Trying to charge the thing while using it heavily is silly. If you need to charge it quickly (during an airport layover, for example) it is probably best to shut it off. Even the supplied charger doesn’t give it too much more juice that it needs to run at full tilt. I can’t say by how much, but it does charge faster if the tablet is in a low power state and/or not being used heavily.

– It charges well with a wider variety of chargers (including a PC Usb port) in Android than it does in Windows. It is most forgiving of all when it is off.

– It ~really~ likes the cable it came with. It also really likes its own charger. Of the many random ways I have to power USB devices only the supplied charger and cable supplied more than 2 amps. I have one usb power hub that will give it 1.8a but pretty much everything else will give it .5a. It won’t charge at all with a Samsung cable I have no matter what I plug it into. No idea what the variables involved are, yet.

– Once I get the Android side rooted I’ll give it the same treatment with SetCPU and a few other ideas. I’ve gotten near iPad longevity out of a Note 8 that way. No idea how well the x98 Pro will do with it but if its managing processor power as badly as Windows is then playing with the processor speed and management schemes should have a dramatic affect on battery life.

That’s about it so far. Its currently crawling towards a full charge and I’ll see what affect the newly revealed power settings have on battery life tomorrow. Real world use instead of gaming and stress tests, though. I don’t think this will ever get the nice gaming performance we’ve seen and have decent battery life at the same time, unless Intel or Teclast gives us a better BIOS.

[Shade]

Oh. This disables sleep of any kind other than hibernate. That won’t work for longer battery life and standby times, of course.

So instead of setting CSEnabled to 0, I added DWORD “Attributes” and set it to 2 for each power function I wanted control over. Now that I know which ones the Atom supports. I haven’t kept great notes on it, though, so I’ll see if I can document it a little better tomorrow.

[Author]

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