Much Worse than Expected Battery Life on Razer Blade 15

Hi guys,

I bought a Blade 15 Advanced (early 2019 I think) a few weeks ago (brand new). In the first couple weeks, putting the battery mode in power saver and switching the screen to 60Hz I was able to get about 5.5 hours of battery life without changing anything else, pretty much what I expected. This week, however, no matter what I do I can't get the battery to last more than a couple hours. I don't think I changed any other settings before that, but now even putting the screen on min brightness, keyboard backlighting off, and keeping just one tab of chrome open doesn't help the battery life at all. I downloaded ThrottleStop to see my CPU power usage and it appears it uses 9-14W on battery saver which seems to be much higher than it should be and could be draining battery, although I don't know how to fix that. Any thoughts?

Edit: The CPU power usage is now down to 1.4W for some reason, but it still does not make a significant impact on battery life. At 99%, it predicts 2:44, about half of what it should be getting.

 

Do you have MSI afterburner? If it’s off, try download HWinfo64 to check battery discharge rate if over -15 watt will make battery life shorter, under that on 80Wh battery capacity it should be 5 hours plus on setting you mentioned above, unless the battery wear is already bad which is quite impossible for not a year unit.

 

Without messing around with the CPU wattage, it's showing a 35-50W discharge rate which is very high - something is sucking up a lot of battery but I have no idea what it is. There is 0.0% wear on the battery, so it must be a software issue. I've actually tried resetting the computer completely but it "ran into an issue while resetting."

 

Check Nvidia Control Panel if your dGPU is active all the time instead of optimus switching to iGPU. Right click on Desktop, Nvidia Control Panel, Desktop tab, Click Display GPU activity Icon, it’ll show programs that run with dgpu, try turn it off manually like closing fast access (if there’s any) usually on bottom right areas. I’m using gpu switcher for corev2 setting even gpu load 0 I notice discharge rate improvement by closing it. Maybe Intel optimus bug that let the software use dgpu background without being noticed on task manager gpu usage.

 

Check all the Windows Power Settings as well as Razer Synapse to see that things are not set to Gaming or max performance, taking more energy than they should.
The culprit is MSI Afterburner's constant monitoring of the dedicated GPU messing with Nvidia Optimus. You can either close Afterburner or Pause the Monitoring and the battery will increase.
Even when MSI afterburner is set to be opened with the iGPU, the monitoring software on Afterburner is waking the dGPU every second to, well ... Monitor the GPU sensors, thus, being activated and drawing power.
I recently noticed that on my blade and as soon as I closed Afterburner my battery started lasting from 5 to 6 1/2 hours.
Looking online, the afterburner programmers are aware of this issue and don't have any plans on fixing it since "Afterburner was never supposed to be supported on Laptops" Anyways

 

Not sure if it was the recent windows update or updating my bios to 1.05 and EC to 1.03 but my Razer Blade 15 Advanced 2070 maxq now has crap battery life. From 6-7 hrs down to 2 hrs with idle usage at 30-34w whether MSI afterburner is on or off

 

You're in for treat my friend. At about the 13month mark, your battery will start swelling (ON CUE AS DESIGNED) and you'll have to make a choice.

Send it in, pay their $3,000 REPAIR fees

OR

Take the battery out, (it's easy my cat did it for me) and just use it plugged in 24/7.

 

you can buy the 3rd party battery online ( cost around $100 USD) and change the battery yourself when your unit is out of warranty.