this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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Low battery life due to high power consumption on t490 thinkpad. (help needed) (lemmy.zip)
submitted 5 months ago by Blisterexe@lemmy.zip to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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So i have gotten a t490 just recently, and ive installed fedora on it, gnome power profiles daemon said it was "on my lap" and wouldn't let me change the power profiles even when on a desk. So i masked that, and installed auto-cpufreq, but the laptop still draws about 10W (according to powertop) when watching a youtube video, leading to 4-5 hours of battery life.

any tips on how to reduce the power consumption?

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[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 18 points 5 months ago (1 children)

5 hours watching a video is not that unreasonable for a machine of that age, especially since it's Intel.

https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/lenovo-thinkpad-t490#:~:text=Video%20Playback%20Battery%20Rundown%20Test

According to this review they got 10 hours with wifi off, playing a 720p video that was stored locally on the machine. Youtube is going to have plenty of background tasks going on, wifi is going to be active downloading things, and you've probably got more than just youtube in the background so I would consider 5 hours to be expected without really delving deep into power saving (and probably killing performance).

[–] Blisterexe@lemmy.zip 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Alright, I seem to remember someone saying that I could expect 8 hours of battery life, which is why I asked, thank you! Edit: spelling

[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Well Li-ion batteries are known in conventional wisdom to degrade to 70% of brand new battery life after being charged 500-1000 times. So if it was supposed to have 8 hours when new then 5-6 makes sense.

When I played around with my laptop's power settings, the LCD screen and screen-brightness were a big power draw between 3W at dim to like 15W at max. That and all wireless functions off, if you can have an ethernet cord plugged in, no bluetooth or USB devices plugged then you can maximize your battery life. Years ago I got my laptop to host a minecraft server with screen off to like 4-5 W at idle.

E: And don't forget if you have a backlit keyboard to turn that off.

[–] Blisterexe@lemmy.zip 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Oddly the laptop seems brand new when I got it, it still had the peel on the power button lmao. Also, thanks for the tips!

[–] registrert@lemmy.sambands.net 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

There's software to check how many mAh most laptop batteres are able to take up and deliver, compared to what they shipped with. Modern ones even have how many complete 0-100 charge cycluses the battery have gone through. You can check if you think there's something dodgy about the battery. I've actually seen laptops factory shipped with smaller batteries than ordered.

But knowing linux and seeing you had an issue with the power profiles I'd think it's software related hah. Is there a discrete GPU onboard it's using instead of the power-saving one perhpas?. Also, did you turn off that awful "dynamic background" on youtube that continually taxes the CPU?

[–] Blisterexe@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 months ago
  1. Yeah I haven't checked that yet, but I agree with the other guy that 6 hours seems like a reasonable battery life
  2. No it's just Intel integrated graphics, and ajto-cpufreq seems to be working great, it's just the deafult one that didn't for some reason.
  3. Thank you!
[–] UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

These probably contain everything you ever wanted to know about the topic:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CPU_frequency_scaling

Be aware that some tools might be in conflict with each other. I recommend auto-cpufreq + thermald. You could add TLP to the mix, but then you need to configure it carefully to avoid conflicts.

[–] Lantern@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago

This article helped me go from 4 hour battery life on Windows 11 to 10 on Linux: link

Using a 5 year old dell xps 15

[–] hollunder@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 5 months ago

While I think that 5h of battery life with yt videos running is ok for a t490 you could still try to recalibrate the battery with tlp.

I have a t470s (has two internal batteries) where suddenly the performance of one of the batteries somehow got really bad. After calibration it works as good as before (upower says it's at about 80%). I did the calibration in windows tho with Lenovo vantage as I'm still running a dual boot setup and didn't know about tlp before.