Talk:How to reduce power consumption
How about linking to this page from the main page?
--Thinker 21:08, 17 Nov 2005 (CET)
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)
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)
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)
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)
