How I extended the battery life of the Cube i7 Book and Fixed Palm Rejection

[TheCharles P. Williams]

Hello Everyone,

Hi,

After having the read Chris’s Review, by the way I completely admire his work, because of him gave me the courage to buy this tablet. I don’t like Chinese tablets after a bad experience with a Onda a few years back. I previously owned a surface 3 atom x7 notebook and was very disappointed by its performance , SSD and touch screen glitches. I bought my cube i7 book last week. In almost everyway it is better than the surface 3. There are 4 problems I have with this tablet and I found a solution to 3 of them.

1. Battery life
2. Heat output
3. Palm Rejection
4. The Depth of the USB-C and usb 3 Ports.

I will address 1 and 2 now as they are the same solution. I have extended the battery life of the notebook significantly thus curing the system by these steps. The Core M has a relatively low clock 900MHz. It does have turbo boost which gives it almost a 40% boost. This boost comes at a cost of heat and also battery. I did two things. I used the Intel extreme tuning utility. And I configured the power control of the CPU via power options in windows.

1. Download and install Intel extreme tuning utility.
2. I made these adjustments aka undervolting and disabled a few boost features.  (NOTE You cannot disable Intel Turbo Boost Technology I dont know why i have a workaround for this i will show later.) I changed the Processor Core Voltage Offset to Minus -70.00000000 mV which also changes the Voltage of the Cache to match automatically. Then I Disabled The Boost Short Power Max. I then Changed The Turbo Boost max to 4.000W and the Turbo Boost Time windows to 4.00 Seconds. After that on the side panel choose Graphics. For the Processor Graphics Voltage Offset i set mine to Minus -72.0000000 mV.[(Note the Mv Undervolting you choose varies alot. Each cpu and gpu is different. Even the Same models different vary. You must find how much you can undervolt. you might go further than me or less than me its a lotto. You will know that you went too far when the tablet hangs or shutdown. But don’t worry after you turn it off and on intel will have detected the crash and reset the defaults and just keep experimenting until you found your sweet spot.) After you have done these settings i recommend a stress test. At least 20 min of each cpu stress, memory stress, and cpu stress. If it goes without a crash your settings should be good. This alone will increase battery life and less heat. The stress test is on the left bar of the program.
3. Now i wanted to go further. So what i did is i right clicked the battery bar on the bottom and clicked power options. on the balanced power plan click change plan settings. after that click change advanced power settings. Click Processor Power Management and then extend the system cooling policy. Change Plugged in to passive. After that hit apply. Now in the same menu of Processor Management find maximum power state. Change on battery to 65% Which after i did my experiments and found that the windows kernel doesn’t let the cpu go over 0.89 GHZ at this percent which means it is a little below the 900mhz clock, the cpu original clock. Thus in practice means that Intel turbo boost not kick in meaning its disabled. For Plugged in i used 85% for less heat. (Some additional knowledge about this option in most desktops if you want to easily disable turbo boost just adjust the percent of the maximum processor state to 99% It won’t go over its own clock BUT This Doesn’t work on outcore M for some reason so i  overrided by finding the sweet spot for this maximum power state percentage to 65% which doesn’t make the processor go over 0.89GHZ.) After this setting i stressed it for 30 min. The CPU never went over 0.89 and the temps toped out at 59c . After that i opened the game dota 2 with native resolution the cpu package heat topped at 83c degrees (Due to GPU adding more heat.) The game was for over 50 mins.

 

After this adjustment i charged the battery to full and tested these modifications with these settings.

I did a video loop test of 1080p of star trek looping. With 25% brightness and hit the battery saver, which is available if you hit the battery icon on the bottom. Wifi off

The video ran for 9hrs 12 Min and battery Left at 2%

The next Day,

I did a day of websurfing and office working you know my typical day with word power point and Youtube. With 25% brightness and hit the battery saver, wifi on. I did have a 5 min break two times and a 40 min break to lunch which i put the tablet to sleep and took this time out of the test as it doesn’t count. I used my smartphone stopwatch.

I got 7hrs 34 Min before the battery hit 6% which i had to go out somewhere.

 

I consider this to be a complete success.

As for my Final problem I noticed that my cables that plugin to the usb-c and usb 3 ports fall out too easily after further inspection it seems the ports are quite deep within the metal chassis. Not very deep but not on the of the chassis edge like surface tablets. I didnt notice this until recently. I dont know if it came that way or if i some how pushed them in and will they get worse or they were already pushed in like that since I got it  and will always be like this. Its not a real biggy. I just cutout some of the usb 3 and usb-c adapter cable rubber grip heads for more clearance and its fine. So I have this question anyone else experience this problem? And for those who are good techies who have opened this tablet up Is it possible they can move in at all if yes would it get worse?

I hope you found my guide useful fellow i7 book users. If anyone could tell me about these port depth issue would appreciate it alot.

Good Day.

 

[TheCharles P. Williams]

Completely Forgot about the palm rejection.

As in all windows tablets palm rejection is %$#@.

I found a way to fix this. In a future version of windows 10 (windows insider program) Microsoft offers a new option in the control panel. Its in Pen and screen settings. Its called reject palm while pen is in range of the screen or something like that. Check that you are good to go. If you want to draw or write with the stylus. Don’t put your palm on the screen yet. Let the sylus be in range of the screen you will see that little pointer then after that you can rest your palm on the screen. It works perfectly no more half screen non sense.

 

You can update your tablet to windows 10 insider edition by this link  https://insider.windows.com/      register an account and download the update tool follow the instructions. This updates only all drivers work fine on it no problems. I cant believe it is a beta version.

Hope you enjoy this all.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for sharing this, it seems great but is the performance lowered a lot? @thetechcharles-williams

<hr />

 

[Nidlax]

Be careful what settings you change. When I changed my maximum processor state two weeks ago, I encountered issues with wake from sleep and extreme unresponsiveness of Bluetooth and the touch digitizer. Restoring the power options back to default when I upgraded to Redstone seems to have fixed those problems.

Note that there are also numerous power management settings in the BIOS that can be played around with.

[TheCharles P. Williams]

Yes I did notice the Performance did lower after all was applied. But still overtook my surface 3 anyways. Its not sluggish by any means but not as fast as when it first came. A lot cooler to the touch. I dont want to take it apart to mod it though. But the intel settings alone i didnt notice anything slower but after the windows power options you can notice but thats the good part. you can make another power plan and set the cpu max in each one seperate so you can choose to favor battery or power 🙂

[TheCharles P. Williams]

I havent noticed anything of that sort i will keep that i mind though and try to notice. Thank you

[Chris G]

The best way to fix the thermals is to do my copper mod, but that involves opening it up which isn’t for everyone and not recommend if you haven’t done that sort of thing before.

Chris | Admin
Please support us and help keep TechTablets online. Affiliate revenue is used to pay for the server, studio apartment (Techtablets HQ) and buy new tech to review. Without it, this site would be dead.
Next up for review:
Ordered and waiting for my: BMAX S15 & Teclast F6 Plus
Currently testing: LG G8X & Redmi K30

[PolCPP]

TheCharles P. Williams wrote:

Completely Forgot about the palm rejection. As in all windows tablets palm rejection is %$#@. I found a way to fix this. In a future version of windows 10 (windows insider program) Microsoft offers a new option in the control panel. Its in Pen and screen settings. Its called reject palm while pen is in range of the screen or something like that. Check that you are good to go. If you want to draw or write with the stylus. Don’t put your palm on the screen yet.

You don’t need to be an insider, just apply the anniversary update, from two days ago.

[Bobo]

Thank you for those simple but evident tips.

Just did it on mine and the battery on power saver is miles better.

I did not lower the clock of the turbo boost however.

Why? I believe by limiting the cpu to 65% you are already stopping the cpu to go into turbo boost.

I like to fire up lightroom to edit pictures, switching to balanced mode allow me to tap into the extra power to edit them without having headache with the power setting and trying to find a correct turbo boost wattage.

Thanks again OP!

[Alex]

Thanks for the guide, but I can feel the responsiveness is a lot slower after setting max power state to 65%.

My sweet spot is do the under voltage above, and simply change power plan to the default power saver, the tablet is noticeably cooler (CPU temp 45C – 54C under normal web browsing) without much impact on performance.

[mshayanh13]

If one does the thermal mod, would this software mod be beneficial?

[Alex]

mshayanh13 wrote:

If one does the thermal mod, would this software mod be beneficial?

Thermal mod should be the best way to go, but it may not for everyone to open up and mod a brand new tablet.

 

[TheCharles P. Williams]

If you have the hardware mod Chris did you would need this software tweaking as his mod will really cool down performance. But if you need more battery, yes you can do this.

 

Welcome to all,

Thanks to all for extra info

I still would like anyone’s input on my last problem regarding the usb ports though, i will quote it from my orignal post,

 

 

 

“As for my Final problem I noticed that my cables that plugin to the usb-c and usb 3 ports fall out too easily after further inspection it seems the ports are quite deep within the metal chassis. Not very deep but not on the of the chassis edge like surface tablets. I didnt notice this until recently. I dont know if it came that way or if i some how pushed them in and will they get worse or they were already pushed in like that since I got it  and will always be like this. Its not a real biggy. I just cutout some of the usb 3 and usb-c adapter cable rubber grip heads for more clearance and its fine. So I have this question anyone else experience this problem? And for those who are good techies who have opened this tablet up Is it possible they can move in at all if yes would it get worse?”

[Sing Along]

Zzz… for those choosing to limit turbo boost, why not just use a surface 3 or some other atom tablets?

same speed better battery life. The point of the turbo is to make it significantly faster than the atom in single threaded operations. but disabling turbo, it becomes no better than an atom and may be as bad as half the speed of a 4 core x7, considering if all the 4 cores are fully utilized.

[TheCharles P. Williams]

I have a surface 3 x7 on hand.

I hate the thing its battery life is better yes. Its built in graphics are really bad. Its touch sensitivity is worse than this cube. The good thing about having a powerful tablet is when you need the power you can have it. On battery i get longer than my stock atom and trust me, its still snappier than my surface 3. the cpu power is set to 65% but when plugged in i give it a little boost to 85%. But if i need the power i change it to high performance mode and get max performance. You lose the options to do that on an atom. Plus cores aren’t everything there are so many factors to look at just research intels website and benchmark sites. I’m about to sell my surface 3 due to it cant beat the cube in anyway.

[Author]

Posts