I always wondered why this wasn't something more talked about. I used to own a Surface Book 2, and the dual batteries in that thing meant it was the only laptop I've ever owned that could run its GPU at near full power on battery.
Is that why MacBooks have always been able to run full power on battery as well? If you open one up, you can see the battery is actually split into multiple pieces like broken up chocolate bar.
@@mini9503 This could be the case as a battery has its limits in discharging and how many watts it can pump. Even in electric cars you see multiple batteries so it can pump out more wattage with their electric motors for more horsepower.
@@HardwareCanucks ayo man ive been watching yr videos from yesterday just binging i found yr old vid from 2013 where u reviewed the roccat kone pure hellfire red mouse ONE QUESTION PLS ANSWER "CAN IT DRAG CLICK"
@@HardwareCanucks hello I have a question I have this laptop and when plugged in now I get lower frames then when my batter is higher 70 before a 40 day break at 10% I can get like 240 frames can you help
I've been waiting for this type of video for a LONG time. This is a very important factor when I purchase a laptop (on battery performance) and it's difficult to get good numbers from most reviews.
This is amazing, also props to aorus for helping out, most manufacturers shy away from anything that could be seen as negative, but this kind of detail just makes me appreciate what the engineers have done and compromises that had to be made.
@@HardwareCanucks 5 Pro is availble for over 2month in EU, Singapore and Malaysia and probably China too, i got mine frok amazon in march but in UK so many people got it directly from lenovo under 1600euros!
Sometimes you search RU-vid to understand something you just purchased, and it ends up being exactly what you were looking for. Even the same exact laptop I purchased. It wasn't obvious to me that performance took that much of a hit on battery. Until I tried it. Which is why I searched it. So great video. You answered every single question of mine.
@Strixon-Brawl Stars Darn that model may be defective because that's not something other laptops do and in my years of owning laptops I haven't once experienced that, you should check your warranty options
I really found this interesting, this is the type of tests that show real life issues that a user may have to deal with or be interesting in knowing. It would be really nice to see more of these videos but with other systems. Razer blade stealth comes to mind, has a different intel skew and its entire project is more centeted around portability than max performance. A dive into amd equiped laptops would also be interesting. Keep up with the great work!!
Some laptops allow you to set a charging limit to extend battery life. In such a case, would the performance still be affected? Lets say the laptop was set to charge only upto 60%. Would you still see a significant drop in performance?
No it wont, it actually very good to set the battery limit to 60% if u wanna play a game while charging, it wouldnt affect the performance, and it will decrease overheating issue, trust me, its good and wise
Im playing it while charging at 60% limit, and my overheating issue has been decreased gradually, and didnt drop performance, i suggest to use 60% if u are gonna use ur laptop while playing a game, use 100% if u are going to do some works like watching videos, editing, writing etc..
I think if you put a limit of 80% and your laptop is in 63% and still, charging could affect. But If you in 80% as your limit and your status is charged will not affect you in theory. Anyway, everyone must test their own gaming laptop performances in different charging statuses to verify that. I think every laptop assembler company could limit this in different ways.
It would be cool to see a research/assessment video on eGPU solutions. I truly wish they were more standardized. Wish it was through an external pcie port instead of thunderbolt. Would probably resolve compatibility and driver issues.
@Obsessed Wolf Base on your specs, you should have the 170W adapter (?) which is giving enough power to charge and play game at the same time. So which profile were you using ? The micro stutter could come from the overheating CPU and many other reasons.
That's why I use my Zephyrus G as a desktop, with the battery unplugged and always plugged to the wall for the maximum performance and not killing the battery life cycles. I just plug the battery back when there is a bios update.
This is a topic I wish reviewers would cover more often. I don’t care if my Strix Scar II can handle BF5 at 100+ FPS while plugged into the wall. Can I get through a meeting taking notes without my laptop lagging beyond reality?
While we're discussing the details, here's what you need to know about the power management mode from Nvidia control panel since a lot of people like to just switch it to 'maximum performance' in global settings. What happens is that now your gpu will try to maintain it's clocks at ~1400 Mhz (or whatever the base clock is) which draws more power to maintain these clocks, drains battery (pretty obvious), generates heat, causes fans to ramp up which also drains battery even if you're on idle. Please don't select it for no reason, keep it on auto/default so that the dGPU downclocks or else you'll keep thinking that your battery life is much less and you might feel the laptop to be noisy as well. On the other hand, selecting the dGPU as your physx processor is a good setting to change.
The battery can only supply X amount of wattage which is definitely lesser than how much the power adapter can supply. It would be interesting to see if higher battery cell count equates to high concurrent wattage they can supply assuming they work in serial or how much wattage can the battery supply per cell. I guess that is something that is very difficult to find out. Would that also mean if the CPU is more power efficient like say AMD at 35/45w would the GPU get more power from the battery and give better gaming performance on battery? It would be cool if you can find this out since you have a lot of sample laptops in hand
based on my tests, yes! an apu, would save a lot.... like I used my ryzen 5900HS with the Redeon graphics, at 720p windowed or full screen, I got almost 2 hours. that's... impressive on a Triple A level. mine is Asus rog g15, and I debloated. deleted armory crate, coz it was only slowing things down. depending on the game, you can hit 60fps constantly, but 30 up to 51 is pretty playable on a good screen
I wish you had explored the options to significantly reduce power consumption. 99% of people will never game on battery, but will absolutely want to do very undemanding tasks such as office work or video for as long as possible. I'd happily run at 800mhz all the time on battery.
Gaming laptops are not meant to be used unplugged - at least while gaming. They are meant to be an All-in-one and laptop hybrid, they can be portable but if you want a portable machine - a gaming laptop is really not what you should be buying.
This is because in most laptops, it has a thermal limit of say 15w,25w 35w etc and if it touches it, ur cpu no longer would draw more performance because of the thermal limit and the GPU also (only in lower TDP GPUs) so if you plugin not only does it charge your laptop but also give unlimited power supply to both cpu and GPU to unleash their full performance, i have a 7200u laptop and mc benchmarks here 768p fancy plugged out: 48 fps avg 5 fps 1% lows Plugged in: 108 fps average 43 fps 1% lows
Another thing is that laptop manufacturers, to be able to cram in as much capacity as possible, use LCO (Li-Cobalt) type Li-ion cells (or some of the lower end NMC, nickel metal cobalt hybrid Li-ion) that are designed for lower discharge rates (i.e. 3-5 amps continuous). Li-Cobalt are also way more volatile than NMC and hence if pushed too hard could go up in some pretty nasty rocket style flames. If you ask me, they should switch to using better NMC cells, like the 3000mAh Samsung INR18650-30Q (which can do a whopping 15A continuous discharge rate without overheating or exploding) or whatever flat pouch cell equivalent from China there is out there. That way, you can have both rapid charge rates and allow full performance on battery without sacrificing too much capacity. Sadly these cells do have a bit shorter cycle life but they ain't expensive ($5/piece from wholesale sites), but of course these are often marketed to OEMs as being meant for power tools, while the lower drain cells are advertised as being for laptops so I guess that's the dumb reason why laptop companies won't use proper batteries.
Laptop engineers knows their tech its literally fucking managers or decisions makers stopping them from designing better things in the end laptop companies are capitalistic profit seeking entity not a fucking tech expanding company those are left for academic or lab researchers
Thank you. I have been talking about this after my regretful first gaming laptop. Notice the problem. Changed to fully customize PC and never turn back. Laptop is made for work purposes. Hence a cheap light laptop are good enough. Leave the gaming for a proper gaming pc. Cheers
I have a genuine question. I'm completely new to gaming laptops and just bought my first one a few weeks ago. It's a Lenovo Legion 5 and while it stays super cool while playing on battery, usually staying around 55 and rarely getting up to 60, once I plug it in the temps for both my GPU and CPU rise up to 65, even reaching 74 at some moments. While I know that those temperatures are complete safe, the device it self gets really hot. The bottom of it and even the keyboard. Even the plug of my charger gets hot to the point that it makes me nervous that it might be damaging the laptop and since this is my first gaming laptop, I am not sure if this is normal or if I have to give up on long hour gaming sessions and just rely on my battery. I only use my dedicated GPU during gaming. It's a RTX 3060 mobile, while my CPU is a AMD Ryzen 5 6600. So, are stuff that I am experiencing with my laptop normal?
It's kinda disappointing that full performance can only be achieved when the battery is 100% charged. That will definitely hurt the lifespan of the battery life in the long run, cause full charge and battery degradation.
Hey Canucks ! Awesome Content i appreciate it! I'm currently holding out for a gaming laptop at the moment. i really want to grab a ryzen laptop rtx 3070 but its almost impossible . I really don't want to settle , I have plenty of hardware to use for now. Just wanted some mobile even if i have to stay close to the wall . Have you guys ever compared the power usage between both intel and amd laptops with similar gpus? Id love to see which would fair better on certain battery workloads .
I knew the first day I bought my Asus laptop with ryzen cpu / rtx2060.. the second I unplug it any modern game is basically unplayable frame rates. even older games run like crap when it's on battery. however I didn't expect to ever be gaming on battery power so it wasn't a problem for me.
It's not just on battery. Performance goes down while charging, too. The only time you get full performance is when the laptop is plugged in and not charging. At least, that's my experience with all the models I've seen.
I got my first gaming laptop and was surprised to see DOOM Eternal and MW tank down to 30 FPS on battery and then boost back up so drastically. I thought something was wrong with my laptop.
I think the main topic here is to prevent wear and tear on the battery (warranty blah blah blah..). I have a HP Omen 2019 and I can set the max charge level in bios to say 80% to preserve the battery lifespan. but since 50% here is the optimal before anything goes south, I guess with my 30% window is to look for a wall socket asap. nonetheless a good video!
Lenovo offers a feature called 'Conservation Mode' on their laptops. To those of you who don't know about it - In this mode the laptop is charged till 55-60% and automatically switches to direct power, while cutting off the battery charge. Does that help with the performance to battery life?
I am in the middle of watching this and i need to know right now before i forget. Where did you get that DeLorean wallpaper at 2:50 i need this right now!!! ok now to continue watching
Out of curiosity .Dont know technical limitations. Why can't we make adapter little big bulkier with adding a bigger capacity battery. Move out battery from laptop itself and keep attached it to battery. It's already a big adapter. Total weight will be little more . Laptop will be lighter and will have decent air flow / cooling and more battery life 😎
It's doesn't solve the portability issue even if you did that. You'll still have to carry two different weights on you all the time. But I guess, you won't have to worry about it getting stolen. The thief won't be able to even switch on your laptop....lol
@@divya11114 All I want is more battery life. Portability is out of question. If total weight (laptop 1.2kg + charger 800g) is 2kg make it 2.2 (laptop 1kg + charger 1.2 with battery ). Make more space in laptop for better cooling. Move battery to outside.
Wow this was really useful information! I knew my laptop was slower on battery, I could not figure out why it wasn’t running full speed while plugged in (charging)
I have ordered my first gaming laptop in a long time, the last one was in the EARLY "DTR" days. I am wondering if you can trick this by using a USB-C battery pack, and at what wattage do you need to trigger "plugged in mode". I'll be able to test when it arrives in a few days but since you posted this now I thought I'd ask. Though it sounds like it won't matter because even charging you aren't plugged in until you are topped off.
Nice and through investigation. Can you test other platforms? like all AMD laptop and specially new M1 Macbooks, I heard they don't limit the performance on battery. I know Mac are not for gaming but for productivity it's there on the chart. Thanks.
Even if we try to game on battery, one thing has to be kept in mind that on many laptops nvidia battery boost is enabled by default. So performance is capped at 30 fps.
I'm curious if changing your max charge from 100%,80%, or 60% would effect anything performancerelated. Like, when you have a laptop that is capable limiting your max charge to preserve battery health over the long run, would your laptop run at full speed when capped at 80% or 60%?
No it wont, it actually very good to set the battery limit to 60% if u wanna play a game while charging, it wouldnt affect the performance, and it will decrease overheating issue, trust me, its good and wise
We need productivity and gaming benchmarks on Tiger Lake U, H35, Cezanne-U and -H iGPUs too! How close have x86 APUs gotten in perf/watt on battery power compared to ARM portable consoles?
They should give you the option of not charging while plugged in and just using the brick to power the components only. Regardless, I still stand by my opinion that gaming laptops are a terrible purchasing decision for MOST people. They are a subpar laptop experience and a subpar pc gaming experience all at a premium price. Most people should just buy a thin and light normal laptop and a gaming desktop. I learned that one the hard way and wasted a lot of money (~$2400) thanks to being hyped up by tech channels.
Great video! One thing about this laptop... how stupid is the settings options for the GPU @04:30? I mean, honestly, you've got MAXIMUM, and then a step above - the hell?
Perhaps why Lenovo is shipping a charging brick half the size of Laptop itself with Legion 2021 models. To immediately go to full performance once plugged in while also charging battery at max possible speed. It may still cut down on both depending upon temps though
Gaming laptops are designed to be plugged in for intensive loads. Unless you want the battery to die faster, it's a bad idea to run intensive tasks with battery power. The battery just serves like a UPS backup if you game on battery power. Interesting findings while charging. BTW 10870H isn't an efficient CPU, 4800H/5800H is.
Can't agree with this. The title at least is misleading. What makes it a laptop is that it's still portable. Your desktop can't be taken to a coffee shop and type documents on it. It's still a laptop, with the capability of gaming when needed. Whether it can game to it's full potential depends whether it's plugged in or not. Regardless of whether the battery lasts 1 hour or not, it's still a laptop that can game at reasonable framerates. Hence, a gaming laptop
You can't really deny the marketing is fishy... The focus is always on gaming, but the listed battery life is almost always based on leaving it idle and they never mention how the performance falls off under certain conditions.
@@derptyderp5287 Yeah but that's true for even non gaming laptops. Standard business laptops will advertise "All day battery life" when you know good and well it won't last 9 - 5 with constant normal usage. Ergo, it's not just gaming laptops, it's all portable devices including phones
Gaming laptops should have a mode to completely kill the battery and just rely on the external power supply when on high performance gaming mode. Kinda like what Sony does with the Xperia phones where you flip a switch and the battery is not used at all, not even for charging.
Excellent content today.... May I suggest just mentioning the battery life under full load from the gpu vs integrated graphics? For example I use my old hp omen for gaming when at home but I use it for presentations also.. Where the laptop on Integrated graphics gives hours of backup..
It’s silly to use uncapped framerates and high/ultra settings when gaming on battery. Nvidia Optimus on my 2018 Dell G7 forces games to run @ 30fps & automatically lowers settings on battery. My i7-8750H downclocks to
This is why we need ARM CPUs, the M1 doesn’t throttle at all on battery. Imagine if you pair that with a dedicated GPU, at least your CPU will be just as fast on battery, and your system will be as snappy.
Ive read somewhere that ryzen 3200u for example uses 15 watts while 5200u uses 25 watts. So with that info alone I guess first laptop would last longer playing games unplugged / outdoors right?
This is exactly the reason why you’re better off just building an sffpc. Fits in a backpack, and with better performance to boot. Using wireless peripherals, and a portable monitor, setup only takes a minute or two longer. Furthermore, a 3060ti desktop GPU performs better than a 3080 mobile GPU. So unless you absolutely need a laptop, sffpc is a great alternative.
I had to send my Asus ROG Strix G15 for RMA last week because its GPU clock was falling to 300MHz on the battery every 10-20 seconds, for about 10-15 seconds. Still waiting to hear from them back.
Here's something that bothers me, idk if you can make content out of it. Me and my friend both have laptops, mine being a bit more recently released than his, I never experience battery drain when putting my laptop on load while him on the other hand experiences battery drain when gaming but only on specific games. I own an Acer Nitro 5 2019 and he has an Asus x570ud. Just a weird phenomena I figured you might be interested to look into
So I want to ask I am not familiar with all these that you explained but I have a question. Basically are you saying when gaming laptops or any other laptops performs badly when it is on battery or?
I wonder what happens when you game on it while plugged in and limiting the maximum battery power to 60% because the battery level is 60%, but it is also at maximum power. I surprisingly have got better results in gaming while plugged in with Balanced mode than while unplugged and in Full Performance Mode.
It would be interesting to see a comparison with a ryzen 5000 series gaming laptop. Maybe the more efficient CPU would allow for better performance on battery.
Gaming laptops are all about gaming when plugged in and doing all other non-gaming, laptop stuff when on battery. I don't think anyone out there wants to game on battery anyways, given they understand the limits of modern technology. I've been looking for a laptop that can game decently when plugged in, and then act like a perfectly normal laptop when I'm on battery, and until 2020 laptops like that were non-existent.Courtesy of AMD, Intel is now striving for efficient mobile CPUs, which is giving us these actually usable gaming laptops today.
Do We Still Have This Problem With Modern Gaming Laptops ? How Well Would An Unplugged Asus Rog Strix G15( RTX 3060 Graphics Card, 16GB RAM, And 165 HZ Refresh Rate) Run 60FPS ROMs Such As PS3 Or Switch Games ?
Why would you run laptop without plugged in and expect full performance ? Do you try to run a 3080 with a 300W psu and expect full performance lol. Video is informative and good analysis but if someone didn't knew some of these things prior they need to research more a bit. Thumbnail on point as always !
I wonder how it would perform on a large portable battery. Like one small enough to fit in a backpack, but still have the adapter to utilize the power brick for the laptop. Alternatively, id like to see performance while being charged with something like a power elite III portable charger.
I'd like to know if there's a performance difference when disconnecting the battery all together. Does it use some power to charge the battery that could otherwise be used for performance? Love your videos btw ✌🏾😁
According to this video it does, but no extra power is going to a battery that is at 100%...... so if no battery in the laptop is going to require you to leave it plugged in 100% of the time anyway I can’t see there being any upside. Also some laptops may not function at all properly if it does detect a battery
only with desktop cpus and laptops such as clevo n960skr with 11th intel like 11700 and rtx3070 140W, you can get smooth playing without stutter as all laptops with good desktop cpus have a much higher 1% fps compared to laptops with mobile processors.
@@alizainps3 by blocking it to 60 percent can I now use it as a alternative pc? I mean like pc setup without unplugging it, will it be fine for the battery?
i am not that of a tech person . but i do have a gaming laptop dell g5se15. i would like to ask .if it is ok to use my laptop while connected to the power supply? would it not damage my battery? i hope an answer be given to this question of mine. Thanks and God bless
Because they have multiple batteries linked inside designed specifically so that plugged in performance is maintained on battery power. AFAIK, only 2 brands - MacBook and Surface does this.
@@mini9503 thank you for your explanation. If that's the case, makes me wonder why the other pc manufacturers aren't going on the same direction in designing their batteries
@@harizsharizal3115 Probably the high cost of manufacturing proprietary batteries. It's one of the biggest reason why so many creative professionals who require power choose MacBook Pros over windows mobile workstations.
@@mini9503 seeing premium windows lineup (dell xps, hp spectre, thinkpad) priced about the same as mb, perhaps positioning the mb at better value proposition. Overall, the argue over pc as the more reasonable option (price v spec) has becoming lesser now
I always thought that gaming laptops were designed to be used as a desktop replacement meaning that it was also meant to be plugged in during use. Playing games on battery feels like walking trapeze without a wire.
