LG Gram 14: reduce brightness below minimum

Some people complain about the low maximal screen brightness of the LG Gram 14 (2021). I have the opposite problem: the minimal screen brightness is to high for my taste - and my eyes.

Is there a way to reduce the brightness of the screen below the minimum? That would also help to save battery power.

I do know about software solutions (dimmer, f.lux) but they seem to defeat the point: use an additional energy-consuming program to artificially darken the screen?

Maybe this is not a hardware specific question but OS related? I have found no instructions though to change Windows registry keys or similar which would reduce the minimal brightness.

Any suggestions welcome!

 

Have you looked for a setting in the BIOS?

 

Yes, I did a while ago, and I checked again now. Unfortunately, I do not see an option to reduce the minimum brightness. As there are scores of settings, I might be looking in the wrong place but there seem to be no entries relating to the screen.

Thank you for your suggestion!

 

You know that it will not save any battery? I feel it's brighter than most other notebooks, but even in pitch black darkness I tend to use step 2-3. Because contrast suffers on the low end

 

I thought indeed that a bright screen would consume more battery power than a dim one. How do you know that this is not true? And is there an easy way for me to confirm?

For my needs - mostly text editing and reading - the contrast is perfectly fine at all settings. Pictures loose more, I agree.

 

The screen is the biggest battery drainer on any laptop.

 

Nope, on the gram it's the CPU package. The screen at lowest brightness is below 0.3w. only switching off will help.

Even at max brightness it will usually (websurfing) consume only about as much as the CPU. Its CPU and GPU are the main power users.

So going lower than the current lowest would not be noticeable on battery life. Up to 80 percent it's very efficient. 90 and 100 percent increase more power than brightness. They are kinda overdrive

 

OK, thanks for the comments @extremecarver and @ZaZ . In any case, I can dim my pixelbook more than the LG Gram 14 (2021) and was hoping for something similar.

What settings would be best to reduce the power consumption of the CPU? After playing around with power plans for a while, I currently get about 2.5-3.5W for my typical usage as shown by BatteryBar (half of which seems to be the CPU according to QuickCPU).

I heard about undervolting but that seems no longer possible for this Intel CPU. Which of the "configurable TDP / power limits" in the BIOS would improve battery life most?

Thanks for any thoughts shared.

 

Actually I tested a bit with external screen - Playing out to 1080P television via HDMI I could not see any difference in battery use vs internal screen at lowest brightness over twice 2 hours streaming IQIYI (actually slightly higher power usage with external screen!). The screen on the Gram is simply super efficient up to 80% brightness. At very low brightness is consumes really next to nothing - most battery drain no matter what you do is the CPU package (make sure to have an efficient NVME drive - some use quite a lot of power). The main thing is to make sure in intel drivers that all power save options are activated. The main other part is debloating windows - especially removing the windows defender antivirus - that is quite a hog (Panda AV is much less of a hog).

I think next generation lg gram will be much better - though not that much is known about the new Alder lake platform. It promised a 50% reduction in idle power use in some screenshots last year spring - since then no new info has come out. But with the cpu package using half the power at low loads - the gram could go for 25-28 hours with 150 nits brightness instead of the current 16-18 hours in real life.

 

Thanks, great to know about the efficiency of the screen!

I'll check out the impact of the AV on power consumption. Not sure I want to pay for a Panda. I am using the NVME the laptop came with, and do now know about it's efficiency.

If 25-28hrs became a reality, that would be fabulous - but I might not yet be ready to go for a new model straight away...

You speak of 16-18 hrs in real life. My battery bar tells me that I should get about 11-12 hrs after charging up to 80% which is a little less. In any case, the battery life seems ok.

 

Just get the Kaspersky security cloud free, very light and an excellent replacement for the resource hog windows defender:

https://www.kaspersky.com/free-cloud-antivirus

https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/kaspersky-security-cloud-free

 

Panda has a free version. I think it's lower in resources. Paid version take nod32, most reviews put this one as lowest resource AV.
Or skip AV all together if you got a concept on how to stay safe without.

 

Did not see the free Panda - will have a look. Not sure I like Kasper.

I looked at the task manager to see what the Windows AV does. CPU usage oscillates between 0 and 0.5% when browsing; seems to check every webpage visited. This is more than an idle Thunderbird.