[BATTERY] A topic about battery life

[Shade]

Spent what time I could this morning on getting root for the Android side. Finally got it. Using SetCPU profiles I’ve set the CPU to stay at the lowest setting (480mHz) while the screen is off. While I don’t have a guess yet on how that will affect battery life it does charge significantly faster with the screen off.

I’ll play around with lower-than-max CPU speeds and see how it balances performance vs. battery life. Android requires less grunt than Windows and I don’t intend to do much gaming with it so I’m hopeful that the slower speeds will be less of a problem with Android. Messing with screen resolution is more risky so I’m going to wait on that until I understand backing up, restoring and reinstalling Android on this device.

[Saz]

You might be right about the resolution, it helps drain less. I found out about it when I realize my resolution was change to 1024×768 after playing some games and didn’t realize it.

Before battery was bad, half day would drop from 100 to 70-60(standby mostly). Then lately only 5-10% drop which is huge but didn’t know how that happen. Then found out about resolution then change back to 2048 and battery is bad again, even when screen off….so weird. So i guess there a connection.

Noob here so take it easy on me.

 

 

[Shade]

Some more details, hopefully enough to save you some time if you want to muck about with the power settings and regedit.

In order to reveal power settings that the device supports but still have sleep enabled you have to add a DWORD “Attributes” with the value of 2 to each power option and, in some cases, sub-options. Here is the list what I enabled based on disabling sleep, looking at the default settings that were revealed then hunting them down in regedit and enabling them manually.

Intel Graphics Settings: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\44f3beca-a7c0-460e-9df2-bb8b99e0cba6

Intel(R) Dynamic Platform & Thermal Framework Settings: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\48df9d60-4f68-11dc-8314-0800200c9a66

You can enable all 3 sub-options there but I don’t think “Acoustic Levels” does anything with this fanless device so I left it out.

PCI Express Power Management: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\501a4d13-42af-4429-9fd1-a8218c268e20

Processor Power Settings: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\54533251-82be-4824-96c1-47b60b740d00

Hoo boy. This one took some time. It has a TON of sub-options designed for much more powerful processors than we have. I hunted through the labels looking for the ones that matched the options that showed up when I disabled sleep but they weren’t there. Apparently the simplified names change based on other factors so I poked around until I figured out which 2 were the ones the Atom supports. They are:

Minimum Processor State: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\54533251-82be-4824-96c1-47b60b740d00\893dee8e-2bef-41e0-89c6-b55d0929964c

Maximum Processor State: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\54533251-82be-4824-96c1-47b60b740d00\bc5038f7-23e0-4960-96da-33abaf5935ec

You could also enable Cooling Policy but, again, I don’t know that the x98 Pro actually has an “Active” cooling option so I left it out.

So far I get significant differences in performance, charging times and projected battery life by messing with these power options. I can’t say “My battery life was 2 hours and now its 5!” because I haven’t actually had the time to verify the battery life projections. I’ve discovered that some of my earlier observations weren’t quite correct and/or made the tablet painfully slow but I’ll post updates after I’ve had some time to verify that what I’m experimenting with is actually working.

What I can say is that I doubt any combination of these settings will make us happy with the horrible battery life on these things. Something is wrong at the system level that will probably require an update from Intel, Teclast or some other helpful company.

Speaking of which, all my tests were also done with Asus’s updated Cherry Trail SoC drivers mentioned elsewhere here. I have no idea if that affects everything else I’ve worked on since I didn’t get into these registry changes until after I had installed those updated drivers.

[Shade]

Trying a battery life experiment in between work and play today.

Current settings:

Battery saver on. Screen at 25% (which I find more than enough for indoor use) and the following advanced power settings:

Intel GFX: MAx Battery Life

Intel Dynamic Power lvl 5

Intel Dynamic Low Power Mode: disabled (this kills performance and also kills the projected battery life. Odd, but haven’t been able to test and confirm that both are true.)

Processor power min: 1%

Processor Power max: 50% (This seems to have more effect on projected battery life and less effect on performance than dropping the power level in Intel Dynamic settings.)

Its… usable with these settings. But not particularly pleasant. But it also projects 12 hours of battery life at 90% power. I don’t believe it but we’ll see how it actually does.

[Shade]

Well,about 6:30 later its still going, though I’ve only been using it for about 5 of those hours. And not doing anything too intense with it: web browsing, YouTube, downloading and installing Skyrim mods.

Currently at 34% with a projected 1 hr 20 minutes remaining. That’s probably a fairly accurate projection at this point.

Some notes:

The settings listed in the post above were too severe. Youtube was nearly unwatchable and wouldn’t work at all above 480p. I fixed that by taking battery saver mode off, disabling low power mode for Intel dynamic settings, and upping the Intel GFX power to “Balanced.” I also upped the Max Processor State to 75%.

Its still sluggish, especially when multitasking, but is comparable to an iPad 2. Not out of the ballpark for a mobile device – though I’d certainly expect better these days. Enough for me to consider using the device as a travelling boredom killer… but I’ll also take my battery pack.

Current screen resolution is 1154 x 864. Text is a bit more crisp than it was at 1024.

I’ve been using Apple BT mouse and keyboard this whole time, as well. Turning BT off would probably give slightly better results. The earlier severe settings also caused more BT mouse lag and eliminating that was also part of my goal as I upped the settings.

[Mark Brock]

i don’t know why the logo when the tablet is in charge continue his movement……is it correct??(charge with tablet mode off) and stay never to 100% but 99% can someone help me?

[Richard Steel]

Chris, it may be worth adjusting cooling policy just to force it into a passive cooling state. If teclast have provided no information for how the processor should run (which seems likely) the its probably running at breakneck speed assuming there is a cooling mechanism. I really want to pull the trigger on one of these but not while the battery life is so poor.

[Milosz]

Chris would be great to see “battery life tournament” from all Ur tablets  what U got 🙂 for me 4h on teclast x98pro that max… I gona  do competition x98pro vs iPad 3 with same YouTube video, ~same brightness (8000mha vs 11500mah) I can bet that iPad will overlap teclast

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[Robert]

I took my k9c3 on a trip this weekend and it lasted 5.5h in android, browsing web and writing emails, which is not that bad…

[Shade]

That’s about what I’m getting in real life usage, as well, without some of the drastic power saving settings I was trying earlier.

For example, it had about a 85% charge this morning when I turned it on. It said 1:50 remaining but it is now almost 4 hours later and with light to medium use it currently has 55% battery and says 2:09 remaining.

At this point I don’t believe the projected battery life at all. It has never once reflected the amount of time I actually get from the battery. Maybe it needs several battery cycles to get its bearings but I’m just going ignore it for a while and see if it gets more accurate over time.

[reinier]

Please find the intel update utility for our cpu and let the utility work for you. It will find the latest driver package and it looks to solve a lot of our issues.

Go to intel website and find support under z8500 cpu.

The default win 10 installation will give you the old drivers and may cause the power consumption. My unit now runs +/-2 watt at normal use and 25% screen brightness.

[Chris G]

reinier wrote:

Please find the intel update utility for our cpu and let the utility work for you. It will find the latest driver package and it looks to solve a lot of our issues. Go to intel website and find support under z8500 cup. The default win 10 installation will give you the old drivers and may cause the power consumption. My unit now runs +/-2 watt at normal use and 25% screen brightness.

 

All I got was the new updated Graphics driver, is that what you’re referring to? Do you have a link to the Z8500 chipset drivers you speak of?

It would seem cycling the battery helps. I just got almost 5 hours in Android from my last use and this was mostly gaming, it has improved somewhat for me.

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[Shade]

Same here. I already installed the drivers from Asus, though, and those might be up to date.

[reinier]

The link:

http://www.intel.com/support/win10.htm

 

At last It helpend in My situation. Download the tool and run It. Then It find the latest drivers and you can install these.

 

Suc6

 

[calin1975]

@ reinier: what’s the battery life with this intel utility? Do you see real improvements?

[Author]

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