Blade 2019 Advance Xubuntu Battery Life

Hello everyone.

i recently picked up a new Razer mercury 2019 to replace my aging Macbook installed a New SSD and partitioned it for Xubuntu 18.10 and Windows 10.

the issue i'm seeing is that in Linux everything works beautiful except for its battery life.
if i'm in windows and play a game i can play games for 3-4 Hours and general web browsing for like 5 or so
while Linux i don't really game on it but i would like it to be my daily OS for everything but Games. but only get a little over 2 hours.

is there some tweaks that people are aware of to get decent battery in Linux. never really run Linux on my laptops so unfamiliar with battery tweaks.

 

1. Install Nvidia 418 driver from grapic driver ppa. Use PRIME profiler option to select intel gpu only.
2. use either powertop or tlp to tune other devices for power consumption.

I have the 2019 4k version, and I am able to tune it with powertop to get 8+ hours battery life (reported when idling, ~10 w discharge). You should able to achieve the same or even better since your display your 1080p. I haven't tried tlp myself on this laptop.

 

I've been experiencing the same thing (Ubuntu 18.04, 18.10, and 19.04) with bios v1.02. I've tried TLP to optimize the power usage, but still same result. I'm hoping that once the 1.04 bios update gets fixed (it hung on my at 99% and had to restart , luckily nothing bricked), it'll resolve things along with linux kernel 5.0 in Ubuntu 19.04.

In Windows, I'm experience 6-8 hours battery life just browsing and light work. I ended up just using VMWare (you can get a pro license pretty cheap on ebay) in Windows to get a linux environment for my development work. It works decently for now, but I prefer the non-virtualized environment.

You can try RMAing and seeing if a different unit has better results. I RMA'd and still got the same results with Ubuntu.

 

I am running Linux Mint on my Razer Blade 15 (dual boot to win 10 for gaming) and am getting great battery life, I can go through my work day web browsing, vs code, terminal, etc without needing to charge.

It took me a while to get to this point with the battery, at first I was getting awful battery life but here are the things I did to get sorted:

1) DO NOT USE THE NVIDIA DRIVERS, just use the xserver-xorg-nouvea driver. I do not game on Linux, I boot into Windows for gaming. When any of the nvidia componts were installed, even if it said that it was using the on board graphics my battery was getting killed! I did a clean install and made sure I selected xserver-xorg-nouvea so that none of the nvidia stuff was installed and it was like a different machine.

2) Install powertop and TLP. My TLP config can be viewed here: https://github.com/ob1-sc/mint-blade-laptop-setup/blob/master/tasks/system/tlp

Main things to point out in my config:

a) I disable turbo boost when on battery and AC, I find the fans spin up to much when the turbo boost kicks in and I simply don't need it for daily work.

CPU_BOOST_ON_AC=0
CPU_BOOST_ON_BAT=0

b) I limit CPU usage on battery, for my daily needs when on battery I don't need 6 cores running up to 2.2.

CPU_MIN_PERF_ON_BAT=0
CPU_MAX_PERF_ON_BAT=40

3) Limit my monitor refresh rate to 60HZ, I only need 144 when gaming in windows.

Hope this helps.

 

Thanks for coming back with your findings / config - saves me a lot of ballache

 

I settled on Manjaro Linux (Gnome edition).
It‘s the only linux so far where I managed to switch off the nvidia card and save battery. Power consumption is sometimes below 10 W when idle (Razer Blade early 2019 advanced with dimmed 4K screen)
Manjaro supports the tool optimus-manager which lets me switch between both cards (with the nvidia proprietary driver) almost perfectly (https://github.com/Askannz/optimus-manager with config from https://github.com/krausest/razer-blade-15-linux-config, only issue is https://github.com/Askannz/optimus-...-with-a-blinking-cursor-or-a-tty-login-screen)

 

An alternative for Optimus would also be Bumblebee! I'm running 19.04 with CUDA drivers installed and using bumblebee has been working great.

 

can you post your exact steps on installing bumblebee? THanks a lot from my mercury advanced mid 2019!

 

Probably not what you want to hear, but Manjaro Linux comes with bumblebee installed out of the box.
And I had quite a difference in perceived performance: All menus (bookmarks, chrome options) on Ubuntu chrome and chromium have a repaint issue where the menu flickers once black when opening. On manjaro with chromium there's no flickering.
(But all of that on my early 2019 razer blade 15 with nvidia rtx 2070)

 

I have finally achieved something with Xubuntu I can live with so far ... The only thing that is missing from my point is that sleek GUI app from Manjaro. I tried Manjaro but my tolerance towards Arch-based linuxes faded quickly.

 

@ob1-sc You are a lifesaver. Just installed Arch/KDE on my new mid 2019 Blade 15, was only getting 2-3 hrs battery life. Installed bumblebee/bbswitch and applied your tlp config, is now reporting 8-9 hrs. Thanks so much for posting your config!!

 

@clydedroid glad I can help. I'm still loving my Blade with Linux Mint as my daily driver, I hope you get as much enjoyment as I have!

 

Has anyone gotten the external display to work on either Manjaro or Ubuntu?

 

Hello everyone,

I'm facing an issue with the battery life of my razer blade advance 15.
I'm using ubuntu 18.04.03 LTS. I installed the NVIDIA driver: nvidia-driver-418.
As I don't need nvidia (only for game), I switched back to the driver intel wih :
sudo prime-select intel (need a reboot)

I limited my monitor refresh rate to 60HZ.
I installed powertop and TLP.

powertop gives me:
The battery indicates a discharge rate of 47.2 W

Which is really not good.. Any help would be appreciated

 

How are you guys able to have 6 hours of battery life on Windows? Since I updated to 1.04, the fan is always running on battery, not that high mind you, but noticeable, and the battery life is little over 1 hour, which is quite weird. Do any of you guys have this issue? (I have intel gpu selected as default).

 

Just wanted to report here that when I’m using the NVIDIA driver the discharge rate is about 15w. As I said with Intel it was 47w.
Weird but I guess I will not have better.