Does anyone here have a Blade Stealth, late 2019 GTX edition?

I'm having a very strange issue with my laptop, and before I go through the hassle of sending it back to Razer for repair, I really want to make sure that it is a hardware issue specific to my laptop and not something that they all do (which you might not have noticed unless you were specifically looking out for it)

I've noticed that even while plugged in (to the 100w Razer power adapter that came with it), if the CPU and GPU are under high load (i.e. in pretty much any 3D game or anything else that uses the GPU), the battery actually starts draining. But as soon as it gets down to 95%, it starts charging up to 100% again, even though the load is still the same (and performance is unaffected). So it actually has enough power available to handle the load and charge the battery at the same time, but as soon as it reaches 100%, it starts discharging again. If the GPU is using less than about 20w (i.e. if I turn a game's graphics settings way down), it doesn't drain the battery.

It's really putting me off doing any gaming at all now, as all I can think about is the wear it must be doing to the battery (as surely repeatedly charging it from 95% - 100%, over and over again, while the laptop is at its hottest temperature, is pretty much the worst possible thing you can do to a lithium-ion battery). So it just doesn't seem worth it... but on the other hand, being able to use it for gaming etc was the whole point of buying this laptop in the first place

The even stranger part is that the battery discharge rate doesn't seem directly related to how much power the GPU is drawing, but does seem related in some way to the GPU load. Somehow, higher percentage GPU load actually results in less battery drain. Using FurMark (which maxes out the GPU with 99-100% load), it settles down to no battery drain at all even with the GPU using 35w (which seems to be the highest it can go) and the CPU also at its maximum 15w.

I've also noticed a sort of (relatively quiet, but still noticeable) "electronic noise" coming from the laptop at times, and I've now realised it's when the battery is draining like this that it happens. The pattern of the noise sounds similar to a hard disk that is reading/writing data (and obviously there is no hard disk in this), but the actual sound is more electronic (I'm not sure whether this is similar to what "coil whine" sounds like, as I've never experienced that)

So if anyone still has this model, could you check if yours shows the same behaviour? You basically just need to run a game and then check in some way whether the battery is discharging, which you can use HWiNFO for. It has an item called "Charge Rate" in the Battery section, but it won't show up when you first launch it if the battery isn't charging or discharging at the time. When it starts discharging, it will appear with a negative value.

Some games might not do it (if they either max out the GPU or use it so lightly than it only needs less than 20w), but I've found that Unigine Sanctuary benchmark consistently causes a relatively high discharge rate on mine (over 5w, along with the noise too), and it's free and a relatively small download. So all you need to do is download and run it, untick the "Full screen" option but leave everything else as default, then click "Run Demo". You should immediately be able to see a negative Charge Rate in the Battery section of HWiNFO if it's doing the same as mine.

Thanks

 

I usually don't use the 100w adapter as I plug into an external Dell 4k that supplies ~90w so I'm used to a small amount of discharge. I've used this laptop heavily over the past year and my battery has like 8% wear.

I just tested 3dmark with the 100w adapter though, and I'm seeing battery discharge. However, this could be a side effect of me disabling PL throttling (as the CPU stays at its 35x multiplier while the dGPU is enabled).

 

Thanks! I'm not sure how heavily 3dmark uses the CPU - did you happen to notice how much power the CPU was using while running it and seeing the discharge by any chance? ("CPU Package Power" in HWiNFO - mine only goes up to 15w maximum when the dGPU is in use, but the battery still drains)