7730/7530 Battery life with only integrated graphics

There was a conjecture that the crappy battery life of 7730/7530 is due to the discrete graphics cards.
If the laptop has only integrated intel graphics, what kind of battery life do they have?

 

I'm genuinely interested in this, too. The XPS 15 and the Precision 5530 achieve more than twice the battery life that the 7530 does, with little difference in components. I really, really want to get to the bottom of this...

 

With Windows 10 1903 and power mode slider set to 2 on the scale 1 to 4 I see 86% battery with remaining 8hr 19min.

This is on 7730 with i9 and only iGPU.

When doing heavier stuff with multiple running Hyper-V VMs, a few Visual Studio 2017/2019 instances and some Office apps I am closer to around 2 maybe 3 hours. In that case I switch at least to power slider position 3, sometimes 4.

Much better than my old m6800 which had i7 4800mq and nvidia k4100m where light usage got me 5hrs and heavy usage 1.5 to 2hrs. Which was better than my m6500 with no (or not working?) optimus which did not get me past 2.5hrs no matter how light the work load was...

Now I am at 85% and 10h 7m remaining

I use the Intel GPU driver from Windows Update: 24.20.100.6287.

Tried the 25.x DCH drivers when I had Windows 10 1809 running. Seemed similar. Updating to 1903 reset the Intel driver to 24.x and I just kept it...

 

Thanks so much for the update, @SvenC. Could you post the battery draw itself, from HWInfo—like this, maybe:


This almost definitively proves the source of the power draw is the supposedly sleeping dGPU, then, and not the CPU, or anything else.

Your notebook is the 17-incher with the most powerful CPU possible, 64 GB of RAM and three NVMe slots all filled to boot, and by right one would expect there to be significant power draw. However, eight and a half hours on 85% battery left is awesome.

I almost saw this coming. So the DGFF definitely draws a significant amount of power, even on Optimus mode. We need to escalate this to Dell ASAP.

 

Still on battery power level 2 of 4 the charge rate jumps between -5.x and -9.x, seldom peeks above -10W.

 

That's less than half mine. Hence, your 7730 achieves more than twice my 7530's battery life. Very nice! Now to figure out why the heck the supposedly sleeping DGPU is drawing so much power, and how to kill it...

 

Thanks @SvenC and @Ionising_Radiation, this is fantastic. I've made a dual thread for the HP Zbook 17 G5
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...ry-life-with-only-integrated-graphics.828605/

Dell should make this fact public, 8 hr battery life is great.

I assume the same problem also existed for the 7720?

 

I wonder if there is some Optimus NVIDIA-GPU-not-sleeping issue that is affecting more than just this system. I haven't been able to get the P5000 or M5000M in my M6700 to sleep — According to hwinfo64, it appears to draw around 4.5W even when it is not being used and the NVIDIA tray icon thing reports that it is off. Pretty sure that this wasn't an issue in the past but I cannot say when it changed.

 

Seems a valid reason to go after Dell, now. I sincerely hope I'm not the only one using these notebooks out and about.

 

Maybe the optimal system should allow three GPU states in BIOS: only iGPU, only dGPU or Optimus.

Having those options changeable without reboot would be even more optimal ;-)

Might be hard to wire up?