Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

Check the event viewer logs for any indication of a process/driver going nuts, it may not tell you who the culprit is, but it's worth a shot.

 

Insufficient data. What do you mean by "moves into sleep?" After what state? Additionally, how do you have it configured; and what should it do normally that is does not do?

 

My GPU performance is shocking on battery, gpu z tells me the clock speed drops to 135mhz on battery. Everything inside the Nvidia control panel is set to max.

Plug power back in and it's back to 654mhz?

On Mains Power



Just by removing Mains lead



No matter what driver I use always reverts to the lower speed on battery, also tried my backup Windows 7 OS

 

I mean I want to shut down into energy-save-mode, well after normal working-state. Do you mean hardwear-configuration?

I guess I should look there once the incident just happened; right now it doesn't tell me very much

 

Hardware and software. The point being is there may be some user error involved if you expect it to do something it cannot.

For example, my system is set-up for high performance so I have it configured to never sleep. Now you know what I want to happen and why.

 

Can anyone do me a favour and see if their M6700 does the same or is it a fault with mine?

Open GPUZ run its own benchmark on mains, then remove the power and keep note of the sensors tab for the GPU clock speed. Make sure its on High Performance or Dell ultra setting

 

I'm not sure if it is a fault, GPUs tend to downclock a lot when they are on battery, I haven't used a mobile nVidia GPU for some time, but for ATI, there is a setting where you can set the card to run at full performance even on battery, the default is set to maximize battery life when on battery. I remember looking for a similar setting for battery vs plugged in with nVidia a few years ago and never found it. Recheck both the nVidia control panel and also check the advanced options in the windows power plan, there might also be a setting for the GPU there.

 

Keep in mind that the system can only draw 100 watts from the battery. If heavily loading the CPU and GPU you can easily push the system beyond 100 watts (you have a 210-watt power supply available after all). It will have to slow down because not enough power is available. Because of this limitation, you can't expect to have 100% performance while on battery power.

 

Yeah in the Nvidia Control panel under base and 3D is set to Single Display Performance and Power management is set to MAX.

Still drops to the slower clock speeds.

Hmm you might have something there but CPU is only under 10% loads with the GPUZ benchmark running. If it was a power setting I would expect more than the 135mhz clock speed though?

So would adding a Battery slice bring the power upto 210 watt? EDIT slice is 97Wh so probably not?

Its limiting the GPU to around 20% no matter what I am doing.

 

No, with the battery slice, the laptop will drain the battery slice first and then switch over to the internal battery. In either case, only one battery will be in use at a time, and 100 watts will be the maximum power draw.

Not sure if your issue is some hardware limitation or if the NVIDIA card or driver is just being stubborn and trying to conserve your battery life. I've noticed reduced performance from the GPU on battery but it's never bugged me enough to look into it. I'd prefer to keep the battery going longer anyway. Drawing near 100 watts will deplete the battery in an hour.