High power consumption x200S + Win7

Hello,

I got a very high power consumption using my x200s (Core2Duo L9400 @ 1.86). I got about 10W if I type/read with maximum battery life profile, wifi on, bt off and screen 7/15. The absolute minimum that I have ever seen with sreen brightness to lowerest, wifi off is 7W. I think it is too high and it gives me only 3,5 hours of working time with 6 cell battery.

Can anyone help? Thanks in advance

 

Have you tried calibrating your battery? Also check the charge wear on the battery..

 

What is the battery capacity showing as? E.g. Full charge capacity in Power Manager/Battery tab?

For instance my PC shows 86 Whr, for a 9 cell, which at 10W would equate to 8 hours which would be good... a 6 cell for your system should have capacity of 52Whr, which would give 4-5 hours which is actually pretty good.

Your 3.5 hours is only a little under this, so perhaps your battery is a little worn or average current is higher than 10W. Either way, it's not far from what one would expect.

 

the wattage numbers you posted look about right. how low do you think it should go?!

the problem is the battery.

 

I will try to calibrate the battery. Please find its stats below:
Desgn capacity: 56.16
Full charge capacity: 45.28
However does battery capacity affect the used wattage?

Note that 10W is when I almost do nothing with the lowest settings. If I switch to power source optimized profile and work with outlook+word+ie (normal usgae) then I have 12-14W as average peaking to 18-20. This gives about 3 hours of battery life only.

 

Realwarder, please also note that your numbers are all right for T series but I have X.

 

Your wattage usage is too high, browsing the internet right now with 9/15 brightness two tabs and powerpoint open I'm at 6.3W on my x200s. Idle with brightness at 0, I'll drop to ~4.6 with wifi on.

If you're using Power Manager to look at wattage then that'll add 1-2 watts, you can use something like BatteryBar to avoid that. But I would just try and follow some power saving guides and see if that helps.

Other stuff like hard drive access, wi-fi transmission, or USB port access could explain it. Or a lot of 3rd party processes running the background, fresh install could help with that.

 

Your battery capacity (Full charge capacity: 45.28) means the battery is worn quite a bit (20%).

Also, google "powercfg -ENERGY", run that to see what might be using more power.

 

If I turn the brightness at 0, wifi/bt off, no USB devices, no any task running I still get 7W. I have never seen 6W power usage no matter what I tried.

Done that no luck

Tried this as well. The only error I got ASPM is turned off and this is common for all ThinkPads from what I read.

It seems that I searched everywhere and done everything. I am getting 9-10W writting this post with no cpu/hdd load and screen at 5/15.

 

How much memory do you have installed? Every 2GB DDR3 is around 1.5W (depends on brand), which when you're looking at 10W is a large percentage.

 

Make and model of HDD or SDD also makes a difference in power consumption.
Also, for the X200s there are different display configurations available:
- 1440x900 (WXGA+) resolution (LED backlight) 250 nits
- 1280x800 (WXGA) resolution (CCFL backlight) 200 nits
- 1280x800 (WXGA) resolution (LED backlight) 200 nits

The CCFL backlight display will consume more power than the LED models and the high brightness/high resolution LED panel will most probably also consume more power than the lower brightness/low res LED model.

There are quite a few different configurations available for you X200s and they all have an impact on power consumption and battery life.
10W with the kind of usage that you've reported falls well into acceptable limits, in my opinion.
I used to have a Toshiba R600 with 12.1" screen, HDD, low voltage cpu, LED backlit and it was also never going lower than 7W even when idle, maximum battery power saver profile, HDD and optical drive turned off and screen turned completely off! (R600 can completely disable backlight). During normal usage it would draw approx. 14-15w and 20-23w under load just like yours, so don't worry, your X200s seems perfectly normal.

 

Thanks everyone for the answers.

I have 7466-5YG model with 4GB RAM, 1280x800 LED and 250GB 5400 HDD. I still belive that 10W is too much for this ultraportable otherwise I am a very happy owner.

 

Just for completeness then, I have a Intel G1 80GB SSD, 2GB RAM, 1280x800 LED screen and SU2300 CPU.

It could be that your processor is just the difference, but looking at battery life tests in reviews on the x200(s) and x201(s), most of them come back with a 8-10W average on internet browsing tests. Meaning even full power processors are returning lower watts than your ULV is.

So there is something different in your usage than basic internet browsing on wifi (listening to music maybe?) or something wrong with your software

 

Exactly

This is what I am trying to figure out. I already disabled almost all of the devices in BIOS (like SD, Ethernet, BT, ExpressCard) and used different settings in Power Manager but it did not help much.

 

well you can believe what you want to believe but you'd be wrong. i have a x200s, similar config to yours except it has 8GB ram, and it averages 9-10W with screen brightness set to 4 with custom settings to maximize battery life.

the reason why you're not getting a longer runtime on the 6-cell battery is because your battery capacity is degraded.

you can try to undervolt it to try to eek out a little less power consumption, but 10W average power consumption is normal. btw, the right or wrong choice of hard drive can affect your total battery runtime.

 

the x201 is more power efficient running at low cpu load compared to a x200s with a ULV cpu.

i've done head-to-head tests between my x200s and x201 and the x201 averages about 2W less and in my battery drain tests, the x201 has about 30-45 minutes more battery runtime than an x200s provided that cpu load is low-to modest.

 

The problem isn't his battery capacity. With a 45Whr battery, he is getting 3.5 hours of use, so he's averaging 12.85W's

Footech is getting 10W sitting completely idle. If he was averaging your usage (9-10) he would be getting 4.5-5 hours of use. If he was getting my average, he would get ~7.

So his battery is degraded, but it his power consumption is still high for an x200s. You show this better by your own comparison, because I assume you have a C2D SL processor too.

 

there are some unknowns which could be affecting his wattage numbers - is his wireless on and what wireless is in his laptop, and what hard drive model is he using?

i forgot to add in my earlier post that i upgraded the default 160gb hard to a very low wattage 5400 rpm hitachi drive which made a small difference.

 

It seems that I finally have nailed down the problem.

I stopped Superfetch, Windows Defender and Widows Indexer services; disabled all unused devices in BIOS and what gave me the most of the saving, exited from all background application (Skype, qip, outpost security suite, dropbox, truecrypt and PGP). Now I have 6W with minimal brightness and wifi on. This is what I expected.

Thanks everyone once again.

 

Wow I feel bloated on my t400 at 11w now. Granted Im using a full c2d and ccfl screen, but still....