The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    Battery Life

    Discussion in 'Lenovo' started by kdizzzle5, Apr 24, 2013.

  1. kdizzzle5

    kdizzzle5 Newbie

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    6
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    How big of a difference is the battery life between a single 750 and a 750 SLI configuration on a Y500?
     
    kdizzzle5, Apr 24, 2013
    #1
  2. kent1146

    kent1146 Notebook Prophet

    Reputations:
    2,354
    Messages:
    4,449
    Likes Received:
    476
    Trophy Points:
    151
    If you are just using your laptop for web browsing or watching videos, change to battery life will be nearly irrelevant. The 2nd GPU will remain idle, and you will get about 3.0 - 3.5 hours of battery life.

    If you are using your laptop for gamign on battery, you can expect about a 25% - 33% higher power consumption using 2x GPUs instead of a single GPU.

    Speaking in general, you want your laptop gaming to be while plugged in. You can be at a desk where you can use a mouse, you don't need to reconfigure any power settings anywhere to disable "Power Saver" mode that throttles down CPU / GPU performance when on battery, and you don't ever need to worry about battery life issues.
     
    kent1146, Apr 25, 2013
    #2
  3. octiceps

    octiceps Nimrod

    Reputations:
    3,147
    Messages:
    9,944
    Likes Received:
    4,194
    Trophy Points:
    431
    My battery life goes down about an hour with the second graphics card plugged in. I've been monitoring my battery discharge rate in Windows Performance Monitor and HWiNFO64 with and without the Ultrabay GPU and that second GPU sucks up quite a bit of power even when idle. This is the reason that Optimus-enabled notebooks get much better life. A discrete GPU, even when severely downclocked at idle, still uses up a lot more power than an integrated one.

    Apparently SLI doesn't automatically disable when you're unplugged. Both GPU's are still pegged like they normally are. I have to go to the Nvidia Control Panel and manually disable SLI to shut off the second GPU. There's nothing worse than watching your battery percentage deplete in real time. :(
     
    octiceps, Apr 25, 2013
    #3