1 year on, my tips roundup for performance

Hi guys. I posted here a fair bit with questions when my m11x r2 was new but haven't had much cause to lately.

Until a week ago I was still getting periodic slowdown in games such as Team fortress 2 and F1 2010 which was really frustrating; I had replaced my thermal compound, had done nvidia powermizer, running throttlestop, was overclocked, running a maximum power setting and all the usual things we advise here, these all need to be done but there were two things I would like to add that were crippling my m11x's performance;.

1. I ran a throttlestop log and saw cmod was dipping to 50% (as a result of overheating I think) so check the chipset clock mod box. (this worked great but actually had high temp shutdown, well over 100 degrees C)

2. Dust! just get the hoover nozzle and suck dust from the intake under the laptop. Amazing temp differences after doing this.



Doing both of these things allows me to play overclocked to 166 and running at turbo all the time, which is amazing. I wish I had worked this out sooner! after hours of solid TF2 my CPU and GPU are still in the high 70s.

I know all of these things have been said before, but I felt compelled to reiterate them when I had such good success. Unclewebb you are a genius and thank you for throttlestop!


r2, i7, 8GB

 

how about battery life after a year? did you leave it on AC most of the time?

 

I've had my R2 for a year and have gone from a well established 5.5 to 6 hours on battery down to 4.5 hours. During a typical day at work I'm on battery for about 5 hours - wifi on, screen usually at one or two ticks, max CPU at 40%, aFX off, BT radio off, IGP used for everything, etc.

Overall I'd say that I've been on the charger 66% of the time, usually when I'm at home feeding movies to the TV or gaming.

 

I run almost always on AC.

 

M11xR1 OC 1.6Ghz mostly using Intel GMA.

Battery life 1½ years on and BatteryBar states 4.8% wear.

Still good for 5-6 hours light use.

Probably more around 5hrs with WiFi and NAS connect.

Mostly use AC.

Hovered out my trusty Prescott P4 HT 3.2Ghz with HD 3850 DX10.1 AGP GPU.
Thought something had been living in there.
Much better air-flow now.

 

Thanks for the info slickie88, been wondering about your battery life after a year of daily usage. I own m11x r2 i5 for 6 months now, learnt a lot from your posts on m11x battery. My typical daily usage similar to yours,but mostly hooked on external display when I'm on work. How about your battery wear according to BatteryBar? Mine was 3,6% of 64something mWh, but presently showing 0.0% of 62,220 mWh

wow.. that's good. My wife's vaio FE series went down to 50 after a year (mostly plugged in). Now its completely dependent on AC --> filling the role of HTPC now

 

Yeah, I'd meant to post my battery wear according to BB, but yesterday when I posted was at 0% of 61,430mWh. Today it's showing 4.8% loss of 64,530mWh. However that's not accurate. As you can see, 1 year ago yesterday (almost 1 month of ownership at that time) I had this with the same battery:



Doing the math, that's a 9.4% loss over 1 year of moderate to heavy battery usage.

 

Doh,

What happened to 'all power to the people'. I don't seem to be getting enough of that.

If I look at a BatteryBar snaphot taken 1 year ago (7-JUL-2010 almost to the day) with a battery that would have been in the system from new (approx March 2010), we see:



Compare that to the BatteryBar status I now have:



Now if one applies the math, one gets an 11.3% loss over one year.

And most of the time the notebook has been on AC.

At the current discharge rate on my battery as it is today I would get 5.03hrs using the current 'Balanced' battery setting with WiFi going full noise and screen at approx 40% brightness.

Given the figures, one could loosely say one would lose 5%** of battery life every six months. (give or take).

** But it's more likely to be an exponential decrease so the percent of battery life reduction will increase over time.

 

Well, I guess it's the normal behaviour of notebook battery then, although we tend to use m11x to heavier extent than other similarly-sized notebook.
I worried too much about battery life

here's mine after 6 months


It still has enough juice to give me 5-6 hours.
batterybar does not seem very accurate on long term basis though, so now I rely on discharge rates to estimate my battery life.

When plugged in, I just disable charging using Fn+F2 hope to prolong the cycle

Other than that, my r2 has had no problem (still cautious with the hinges though), yet to reapply the thermal paste.