Lenovo Legion 5 15ARH05H battery life

[EllendelingMusic]

Hello folks,

This is my first post here on here. I'm glad to join your community!

So, my Lenovo Legion 5 15ARH05H came in yesterday. A solid machine and it definitely performs well! However, the battery life is not what I expected it to be. I've tried optimising battery life the best I could, but I can't seem to get more than 3,5 hours out of it. When on battery on only use it for Office applications, video and browsing. Here's what I've tried:

- Applied Lenovo Vantage intelligent cooling profile.

- Installed Ryzen Controller and created a battery saving profile that limits the CPU TDP to 15W;

- Activated hybrid mode to make use iGPU. I can confirm the RTX 2060 GPU is not doing anything unless I'm gaming. There are no visible spikes in task manager;

- Changed power plan settings to limit CPU usage to 60% on battery. CPU usage is around usually around 10-15%.

- Disabled keyboard backlight;

- Lowered screen brightness to around 60%;

- Tried changing the refresh rate of the display to 60 Hz, but this doesn't seem to be possible;

- Disabled startup programs;

- Enabled Nvidia GPU Activity icon. No rogue programs or applications use the dGPU. 

Considering my Legion has a 80 Wh battery, shouldn't it easily last 6+ hours? I believe I've seen 60 Wh batteries last longer than my laptop with the exact same configuration.

Would love to get help on this! 

Edited January 27, 2021 by EllendelingMusic

[genexis_x]

13 hours ago, EllendelingMusic said:

Installed Ryzen Controller and created a battery saving profile that limits the CPU TDP to 15W

power limits don't interfere battery life

 

use hwinfo64 to check battery discharge rate, check dGPU is awake or not and check CPU power draw while idling

[cheeseman443]

On 1/27/2021 at 10:21 PM, genexis_x said:

power limits don't interfere battery life

 

use hwinfo64 to check battery discharge rate, check dGPU is awake or not and check CPU power draw while idling

I have the same laptop as OP and I am experiencing the same issue. I have the NVIDIA GPU completely disabled, brightness almost all the way down, power saving mode, etc. I can hardly get to 2 hours using LibreOffice and very light web browsing.

 

As I am writing this HWiNFO reports that the CPU is using about 2.9w with 6 firefox tabs, LibreOffice, and KeePass2 open

.

Here are the battery stats as well.

Any ideas?

[genexis_x]

2 hours ago, cheeseman443 said:

I have the NVIDIA GPU completely disabled

You will disable Optimus. Never do that.

 

-29W discharge rate is very high, Normal should be around 6-8W while idling. Try a clean Windows install.

[EllendelingMusic]

On 1/28/2021 at 4:21 AM, genexis_x said:

power limits don't interfere battery life

 

use hwinfo64 to check battery discharge rate, check dGPU is awake or not and check CPU power draw while idling

I checked CPU power draw like you asked. The CPU is drawing 2-3 W during light browsing. Total system power draw is around 8-9 W. Note: keyboard backlight is off and Windows power plan settings are set to save power. dGPU is in hybrid mode and is currently not doing anything, so I believe it's switched off by default if I'm not running any demanding tasks. GPU SoC power is mostly 0 W. GPU ASIC is switching between 2-4 W. So that indeed adds up to 8-9 W total system power draw, assuming the SSD draws nearly nothing. When I turn on my keyboard backlight total system power draw jump to 14-15W. Is it normal for my keyboard to draw 6-8 W on its lowest brightness setting? 

[genexis_x]

12 minutes ago, EllendelingMusic said:

The CPU is drawing 2-3 W during light browsing

Monitor it while idling.

12 minutes ago, EllendelingMusic said:

Total system power draw is around 8-9 W

You read from 'charge rate' in hwinfo?

13 minutes ago, EllendelingMusic said:

GPU ASIC is switching between 2-4 W

Does GPU temp show 0C?

[cheeseman443]

16 hours ago, genexis_x said:

You will disable Optimus. Never do that.

 

-29W discharge rate is very high, Normal should be around 6-8W while idling. Try a clean Windows install.

Ok I enabled the NVIDIA GPU again and I am sitting at -11062 mW discharge. I also clean installed Windows the day I got the laptop.

 

Anything else I should try to improve the discharge rate?

[Darkseth]

Check your Windows Energy-options.

"Minimum CPU Performance" should be at the lowest possible, 5%~.

Sometimes it could happen, that this is set to 100%, so your CPU always runs at maximum Clock speeds.

 

How high is discharge, when you just Reboot it, let stuff load, and just don't touch anything?

Like, when it does really nothing. Maybe something in the background is working too much.

 

[cheeseman443]

4 hours ago, Darkseth said:

Check your Windows Energy-options.

"Minimum CPU Performance" should be at the lowest possible, 5%~.

Sometimes it could happen, that this is set to 100%, so your CPU always runs at maximum Clock speeds.

 

How high is discharge, when you just Reboot it, let stuff load, and just don't touch anything?

Like, when it does really nothing. Maybe something in the background is working too much.

 

Rebooted and it actually went UP to 13w. Its sitting at about 15w as I am writing this with just one tab in firefox open.

[Darkseth]

What does Task manager say, if you sort by CPU usage?

But that also might include the Display itself. If you lower Displaybrightness to lowest, it should go down by alot, right?

[genexis_x]

7 hours ago, cheeseman443 said:

Ok I enabled the NVIDIA GPU again and I am sitting at -11062 mW discharge. I also clean installed Windows the day I got the laptop.

 

Anything else I should try to improve the discharge rate?

update all drivers?

[cheeseman443]

On 1/30/2021 at 9:28 PM, genexis_x said:

update all drivers?

All drivers are up to date. It seems that the discharge rate is high at random times. Sometimes its high sometimes its not. The machine could be ideal or I could be running firefox or visual studio code. No matter what I am doing it seems to be random. I don't see any rouge background programs in task manager. I honestly have no idea what it could be.

[Velquer]

On 1/30/2021 at 11:21 AM, EllendelingMusic said:

I checked CPU power draw like you asked. The CPU is drawing 2-3 W during light browsing. Total system power draw is around 8-9 W. Note: keyboard backlight is off and Windows power plan settings are set to save power. dGPU is in hybrid mode and is currently not doing anything, so I believe it's switched off by default if I'm not running any demanding tasks. GPU SoC power is mostly 0 W. GPU ASIC is switching between 2-4 W. So that indeed adds up to 8-9 W total system power draw, assuming the SSD draws nearly nothing. When I turn on my keyboard backlight total system power draw jump to 14-15W. Is it normal for my keyboard to draw 6-8 W on its lowest brightness setting? 

Hi did you manage to solve the battery problem, same issue here!

[Gandeloft]

I've created an account here right now, 14th of June 2022, to say that the problem still persists. I've found this, amontg other threads while trying to solve the issue for myself.

I got a Lenovo Legion 5 15ACH6H last week which is the updated version with an RTX3060 and a Ryzen 7 5800H..

At idle it uses about 30w on average.

I don't know why but it is sill bad

The refresh rate still cannot be lowered below the only option which is the display's highest refresh rate, 165Hz.

So this has been an issue for much more than a year by now without a fix.

I am returning the laptop today after work for a refund..