Hi All,

I wanted the forums thoughts on the X1 Extreme Gen 2 battery life issue that seems to be a never ending battle with this laptop. I sought out the X1EG2 laptop due to its claimed 11+ hour battery life as reported on the Lenovo website thinking it'd be an absolute brilliant machine for portability and have a dedicated graphics card for when i need to perform graphics intensive work.

I do a lot of photography work so decided to upgrade the display to the 4k option for the better calibration and colour reproduction but what i didnt factor in or get notifeid in any of Lenovo's documentation in doing this will reduce the screen-on time to 2 1/2 hours at best running light web browsing tasks.

I have performed the following steps to increase my battery life, but still only see a maximum of 2 1/2, maybe 3 if im running extremely low screen brightness and not multi tasking --

1. Turn off all apps ability to run in the background
2. Clean install of Win10
3. Installed the latest drivers / BIOS settings (currently running v1.30 bios and the latest nvidia / intel drivers)
4. Deleted all un-necessary apps from the laptop
5. Disabled all startup items
6. Disabled all Windows pretty settings and set everything to basics
7. Switching to Edge just for web browsing for a mobile use session to see if any significant

But, as mentioned above im only getting 2 - 3 hours of battery life if im careful.

Can anyone provide some constructive assistance with this issue as im at witts end if this is resolvable to get the 4+ hours i was reading others get, but still a far cry from the advertised amount. Is this something Lenovo will accept a return on? Is it something that can be improved?

I don't want to go down the route of under-volting the CPU and that's the last step i've been able to research is available to try to eek out a bit more on-battery time.

The compairson I keep looking at is the Dell XPS 15" is able to get 8+ hours on cord free use with a 4k panel and all the performance specs of the Lenovo X1 -- so is this just another case of lenovo software / firmware strikes again to explain the huge difference in battery life -- or is there something else to it?

Any assistance would be appreciated on others persona experiences, what theyve done, anything -- to try to resolve this issue.

Cheerssssss

disclaimer: my unit is a X1 Ext Gen1; 4k, processor 8750H

after a lot of internet reading i came across this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/dddsqv/guide_ultimate_windows_battery_life_tips/

while i am not undervolting i used TS in order to understand battery consumption and understood was always idling at 3w and stuck at C3 (no deeper C states).

in my case going over HIPM+DIPM+DevSleep plus updating intel AHCI controller increased battery life dramatically; charged at 95% gives me approx. 7h30.

@js1917 Where did you find the Intel AHCI controller? In device manager, under Storage controllers, I only see "Microsoft Storage Spaces Controller" and "Standard NVM Express Controller."

let me explain a bit better; from the link i pasted above i focused on the following part under Check/Enable deeper C States [Intel] (VERY IMPORTANT): 

I am still not completely sure about what exactly causes the issue, however it is thought that the cause is a generic or outdated disk-related driver. Try updating your disk controller. If you have a SATA based SSD, updating the ACHI controller may work. Some users have reported success by uninstalling Intel Rapid Storage Technology (IRST) or installing IRST and disabling a performance related setting. Some users have reported success by enabling IRST SATA power savings.

For me, all I had to do was update the disk controller. Since I have a Samsung NVMe SSD, all I had to do was update the disk driver from a generic Microsoft one. SATA based SSD/HDDs usually benefit from an updated Intel ACHI controller.

reason being i had literally tried every other possible troubleshooting i could think of and still was stuck on a considerable idle consumption for no reason i could think of. so i went to lenovo support and downloaded the latest Intel ACHI controller (dated mid 2019 if i recall). of note that apart from the 512Gb SSD that shipped with the unit i have a 2nd one from my former laptop.

not sure if one or both were the reason that was not allowing the consumption to drop. this along with the HIPM+DIPM+DevSleep (important) tweak i had also mentioned.

on any note, i now have a substantial lower idle consumption and much longer battery life. with light usage today I got over 6h from 95% to 20% with light browsing and office work.

@js1917 Thanks for the response. I went and re-downloaded the driver you mentioned. Still have the "Standard NVM Express Controller" in Device Manager (don't see anything AHCI-related). Could you send a screenshot of your Storage Controllers in Device manager?

Hi,

I had the same problem with battery life with my X1 Extreme Gen2 (i7 9750H, 4k IPS). I couldn't get over 4h from 100% to 10%. Very frustrating.

The following tweaks helped me to gain 1 more hour:

1. In Advanced Power Settings of Lenovo Intelligent Power Plan (Control Panel -> Power Options) I changed: a) Maximum processor state (On Battery): 90%, b) Intel Graphics Power Plane (On Battery): Maximum battery life, c) Wireless Adapter Settings (On Battery): Maximum power saving, d) PCI Express -> Link State Power Management (On Battery): Maximum power saving. Using these settings, my laptop works just fine on battery for web browsing and office (I haven't noticed any lags).
2. In NVIDIA Control Panel -> Manage 3D settings, I switched the preferred graphics processor to Integrated Graphics. I do not play games and the Integrated Graphics (Intel 630) is just fine for browsing, coding and office. I use the nvidia only for the external monitor.

BUT, beyond the above tweaks, what was the most important for me to gain more battery life was to get rid of the Lenovo Display Optimizer app. I wanted the specific application (it was very useful for me), so I had it to start with Windows. Observing Task Manager when on battery, I noticed that the Desktop Window Manager (DWM.exe) was utilizing about 30% of GPU when I was just moving the cursor over the screen and about 90% when I was scrolling web or Word pages (causing several lags and high GPU power usage). I tried everything to find out what was going on and I had so much GPU utilization just by moving the mouse. Eventually it was the Lenovo Display Optimizer app which by applying its color profiles, it was causing extremely GPU utilization (thus high GPU power usage) by the dwm.exe. I stopped using this application and I played around with several windows settings regarding the windows and the cursor colors, so I managed to have the default color profile. Now I have normal GPU utilization by the dwm.exe (just 5% when moving the cursor over the screen). I believe that there is a severe bug in the Lenovo Display Optimizer app, because if I use it again I have again high GPU utilization by the dwm.exe (thus, high GPU power usage).

After all the above, now I have 6-7h battery life from 100% to 10% with light web browsing, e-mails and office apps. Of course, if I start watching youtube videos, I have half of it.

see attached for both; consider i did not isolate them so not sure if one or both in conjunction allowed for the battery gains:

@js1917 There is literally no chance of me getting that amount of battery life from 90% charge -- can you advise in detail what you changed in windows or tools you used to to get that battery life?

Following on from my initial post i've now setup the power scheme's AHCI Link Power Management to 'Lowest' and run Driver Booster to make sure i'm running the last drivers for anything power related -- still seeing nothing close to your results

consider i have a fairly minimal setup and in addition i understand minimal differences on either the setup, CPU or GPU can dramatically change battery consumption.

what i did in order:

#1 disable unnecessary windows services

#2 disable all startup entries

#3 update Nvidia driver back in Oct/Nov 2019 (which provided at the time an increase on battery from 2h30/3h to 4h15/4h30

#4 play with Intel Graphics (relatively important) settings (again refer to link posted previously); no significant change in battery consumption, maybe up to 5h

#5 update to latest bios; no significant change in battery consumption

#6 HIPM+DIPM+DevSleep (important) plus follow instructions under Check/Enable deeper C States [Intel] (VERY IMPORTANT): this was by far the game change with a substantial increase in battery life

the only thing i can add is that on every step you always have throttlestop (TS) running in order to check consumptions (after a reboot) and above all check the C-states. consider i use TS only for monitoring purposes, no undervolting whatsoever.

as an example on the attached, my power consumption is anywhere between 1.7w and 2.3w with outlook, firefox (4 tabs) and music through bluetooth while before was around 3.5/4w. before the tweaks on point #6 i couldn't see any activity on C8 or C9, was stuck at C3. you may try those more knowledgeable for specific clues as not sure i could help much more

@js1917 Thanks for that. How did you manage to enable C9? No matter if I am on AC or unplugged, I always see a maximum of C8 (always 0.0 for C9 and C10). Also, when monitoring Throttlestop and Task Manager, my idle C0% plugged in is usually around 0.3-0.6, and power consumption is ~1-2W. In Task Manager, there are usually only 1-3 programs/services using CPU. However, when I unplug my laptop, even though the idle power consumption decreases to ~0.5-0.7W, the C0% increases to 0.7-1.2. This is evidenced by a sudden increase in the amount of programs/services utilizing CPU power, each using around 0.1-0.2%. Is this normal? Does this happen to you? How would you fix it?