Samsung Series 5 NP530U3C ultrabook battery life

I just purchased the Samsung NP530U3C-A01US ultrabook. The specs says it supports up to 7 hours battery life. I have the laptop running with the default Samsung optimized power plan (brightness dimmed at about 40%), and I'm getting about 4 hours & 15 mins battery life while surfing the net or looping a 720p video before the comptuter goes into hibenate mode. Is this battery life normal or bad? should I change it to the Power Saver Mode or Samsung Eco Mode, which one is better?

I'm considering upgrading the memory to 8GB by adding a low voltage 1.35v 4GB memory, also considering adding a Samsung 830 SSD, will either one of these improve the battery life?

If I upgrade to a 128GB or 256GB SSD, when I take out the existing hard drive, will that also remove the 24GB ExpressCache SSD? or is this 24GB SSD built-in and will still be there even after I put in a new SSD? If it's the latter then will this 24GB ExpressCache SSD partition show up when I re-install Windows? Should I delete it?

 

Optimized power plan should in theory be a performance-optimized power plan, not really a battery optimized one. Try the Eco Mode. Since you get the same battery life either browsing or looping 720p video, the battery runtime sounds plenty ok.
Low-voltage memory shouldn't really affect your battery life much.

From TH: Conclusion : How Much Power Does Low-Voltage DDR3 Memory Really Save? there was a recorded difference of between 1W idle to 4W under load consumption. The battery is rated for 45 Watt Hours, so under load that might be important enough to get you maybe half an hour extra life. When idling it's basically negligible.

Regarding the samsung SSD, while it's power consumption is very good when idle (around 0.35-0.40w), it's a HUGE consumer when under load (reaching around 5w) bringing it very close to classic hard-drives, so really, you wouldn't be getting much of a battery life benefit except for idle.

The ExpressCache SSD should be a built-in mSata, because the only hybrid hdd i know of is the Momentus XT, and the SSD cache on that only comes in 4GB and 8GB flavors, not 24GB, so yes, it should be safe to upgrade. On the other hand, upgrading to a SSD will render that express-cache next to useless, since most SSD's are faster than such 'cache' drives.

To be honest, I don't know that there's much you can do to optimize power consumption on that lappy. Try the eco mode. If you consider changing the ram, first use CPU-Z to verify what voltage it's running at - it might be LoVo already.

Quite frankly, with the extremely weak battery your laptop has (don't be fooled by the 6300 mAh rating... in order for it to have 45 WHours the battery has to be very weak. My calculation places it at a voltage rating of only 7 Volts, which is very weird, since mobos usually draw 12V, but at 45 WHours that would only actually rate that battery at around 3600mAh... which honestly, would be more realistic).

 

Samsung's 7 hours from a 45Whr battery is a power drain of little over 6W which means a dim display and not much happening on the computer. It might be feasible if working offline (WiFi and web browsers use power) working on a Word document or browsing a PDF file. Your 4:15 is reasonable for your usage conditions and is equivalent to about 10W power drain (run a program such as HWinfo to see the actual power drain). Turning off WiFi and Bluetooth will save some power.

An SSD should increase the time a little because of lower idle power consumption. However, dropping from 10W to 9.5W won't add much to the time. Similarly, 1.35W RAM uses about 20% less power than 1.5V RAM, but that's 20% of ?2W? if the RAM is being actively used and 20% of something less if the computer is on low usage. [That's my best estimate from my own measurements - the TH article linked to above is for more power-hungry desktop RAM.] Try the different power plan options and see the impact on the power drain.

John

 

Thank you for the replies.

So sounds like the ExpressCache will still exist even after I put in a new SSD? do I need to change any settings in BIOS to disable the ExpressCache from working when installing a new SSD?

Are the original Samsung factory restore files saved in the 500GB hard drive? if so does that mean I'll no longer be able to restore the computer to original factory state if I upgrade to a new SSD?

Is there a better SSD other than the Samsung 830 that can help improve the battery life? I only use my laptop for web surfing, streaming videos, and work with office programs.

How do you disable the Bluetooth? I see the icon in system tray and couldn't find the option to disable it.

 

btw, I noticed there is something strange about the touch pad, the cursor with the finger movement is smooth and fast around the center area of the touch pad, but towards the edge the movement becomes slow and insensitive. I played with different touch pad settings and still got the same result. Is this just the way it's designed?

 

do I need to change any settings in BIOS to disable the ExpressCache from working when installing a new SSD?

AFAIK, no BIOS setting for the iSSD (ExpressCache and Intel Rapid Start). You may wish there was when installing Windows to a new SSD from a USB flash drive. But you haven't reached there yet.

Are the original Samsung factory restore files saved in the 500GB hard drive?

Yes, that would be in the recovery partition.Use the Windows Disk Management tool to see your partitions.

if so does that mean I'll no longer be able to restore the computer to original factory state if I upgrade to a new SSD?

The only reason I would want to restore the original factory state would be if I'm sending the ultrabook back to Samsung with the original HDD. So keeping the system and recovery partitions intact on the original HDD, and using it for backup in an external USB3 enclosure, is what I did after replacing it with an SSD.

Is there a better SSD other than the Samsung 830 that can help improve the battery life?

There is the 840 series but am too lazy to research the improvements. Someone else can chime in there.

How do you disable the Bluetooth?

Easy Settings ---> Wireless Network

 

Quite frankly, with the extremely weak battery your laptop has (don't be fooled by the 6300 mAh rating... in order for it to have 45 WHours the battery has to be very weak. My calculation places it at a voltage rating of only 7 Volts, which is very weird, since mobos usually draw 12V, but at 45 WHours that would only actually rate that battery at around 3600mAh... which honestly, would be more realistic).

While the battery life of Series 5 UBs may not be great, your reasoning/calculations here seem to be flawed. Firstly, the full charge capacity of the battery is 45 Wh but the full charge voltage is around 8.4 V. Both capacity and voltage will fall as it discharges.

Secondly, and most importantly, the operating voltage of the motherboard is irrelevant in terms of the battery specification. Arriving at what appears to be an equivalent mAh rating based on the ratio 7/12, due merely to the use of a boost converter, makes no sense either.

 

I would add that the only meaningful measure of battery capacity is Watt-hours. (Watts = volts x amps for those who have forgotten their school physics). Amp-hours is no use without knowing the voltage but there are specs (and reviews) which only provide this information.

John

 

Let's take this discussion a few steps further based on the following;

1. Battery specifications Samsung gives for three different laptops;

Specs - Series 5 Notebooks NP530U3C | Samsung Laptops
Specs - Series 5 Notebooks NP530U4C | Samsung Laptops
Specs - Series 7 Notebooks NP700Z5CH | Samsung Laptops

2. Characteristics of Lithium-Polymer (Li-Po) batteries;

Lithium polymer battery - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The above (1 & 2) give us the following;

1. The fully charged energy capacity of the battery (Wh)
2. The electric charge transfer characteristics of the battery (mAh)
3. The amount of Li-Po cells used in each battery
4. The fully charged voltage of an Li-Po cell (V)


If we divide the Wh rating by the mAh rating we are able to get an idea of the voltage involved (this is what sangemaru did in his post). Given that this voltage can only take on increments of 4.2 V (when fully charged), we should be able to arrive at the fully charged voltage of the battery and the series/parallel configuration of the cells involved in each battery (voltage adds for each series configuration, capacity adds for each parallel configuration).

Ultimately, it's the energy capacity of the battery and the energy requirement (power required x battery life) of the laptop that determines the battery life. The voltage levels (12 V, 5 V, 3.3V, whatever) required on the motherboard are mostly irrelevant.

Finally, please do not assume that I'm an expert on anything in the foregoing. Most of it is based on speculative commonsense (if there's such a thing). And rebutting anything that is obviously wrong would be best for preventing the spread of misinformation.

 

is it a good idea to enable the battery saver feature? charging to 80% will lose about an hour of battery usage (that kind of sucks). But if I don't enable this feature, does it mean my laptop battery will die in 3 years and need to be replaced?

 

Squeezing in the last 20% of charge causes a disproportionate amount of the battery wear. If you don't normally need the extra hour then enable the battery saver. If sometimes you know you need the maximum run time then temporarily disable the battery saver.

John

 

Another question on charging, when the laptop battery is charged to 100%, can I just leave the charger cable plugged in for as long as I want? is this what you guys do when using the laptop at home or in the office? will that cause any harm to the battery life if overcharged?

 

The battery will not get overcharged: Once full, charging stops until the charge level drops slightly.

However, if you expect to keep the computer plugged in then use the Battery Saver option because topping up the battery to 80% causes much less wear than topping up to 100%. Another option is to disable Battery Saver, top up to around 95% and re-enable Batter Saver. There will then be no topping up until the charge drops below 80%, which could be a few weeks if left plugged in to mains power.

John