Talk:How to reduce power consumption

How about linking to this page from the main page?

--Thinker 21:08, 17 Nov 2005 (CET)

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Best battery discharge times

With your best power saving, what kind of battery power times are you guys experiencing? The best that I can do with my t43p with the standard (6cell) battery is 2h, and with the ultrabay battery is 1 hour. All of the power saving 'tricks' - hard drive spindown, even adjusting the brightness of my display, has relatively modest effect (~20% max), although CPU throttling definitely reduces power consumption.

In terms of discharge rate, I really can't get below 19,520 mW/h with the hard disk off, wifi on, cpu down to ~700 MHz, and display on minimal brightness with ATI driver power save enabled. In my "normal usage" environment (WiFi on, word processing / non cpu-intensive programming, etc.) I average 21,000 mW/h.

Of note, I have the UXGA display, which might be a huge power guzzler. I have friends with an X40 that claim 5 hours from the 9 cell...

--gsmenden 16:56, 10 Feb 2006 (EST)

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ThinkPad T43, SXGA+, undervolted, fan disabled, minimum brightness, disk off, WiFi off, GPU power saving: 13 to 14W, i.e., slightly over 3 hours with a new 6-cell battery. See How to reduce power consumption.

--Thinker 22:46, 10 February 2006 (CET)

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Interesting... that would imply ~5W for the bigger screen? That seems high. Could you tell me your basal rate at 700 Mhz by chance? - everything else should match my system (using your fan control v.28 (-thanks!), minimum brightness, disk off, WiFi off, GPU power saving enabled with ATI driver.)

--gsmenden 18:16, 10 Feb 2006 (EST)

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The 13-14W figure is with automatic cpufreq scaling and low load, so it's effectively at 800MHz (minimum speed for this 1.86GHz processor). Are you undervolting the CPU too?

--Thinker 00:36, 11 February 2006 (CET)

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To my understanding it would seem very unlikely that the higher resolution/bigger display uses a lot more power than lower resolution/smaller ones - except the case that they would have four light tubes instead of one. I'm pretty sure that X series displays have ónly one. Wyrfel 01:20, 11 February 2006 (CET)

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for T42 with 14" XGA, ATI 7500 at 80/100MHz, 600MHz@0.7V, hdd off, wifi off, linux:

 1) min. brightness - 7,6W
 2) brightness is 4 of 7 - 8,6W
 3) max. brightness - 10,1W

2200bg in battery mode consumes ~0,4W. and I bet the iron can go lower runnig windows with native drivers. the only thing I really miss is powerplay support for 7500.

--Bzzt

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You mean they nearly doubled the minimal power draw when moving to the T43's Sonoma chipset and Dothan CPU? So you actually get 5-6 hours from a 6-cell battery?! Spooky.

--Thinker 01:42, 11 February 2006 (CET)

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