Battery Lifetime

[matthias-herrmann]

I've installed the nvidia driver and the battery of my dell laptop is only lasting 2 hours (maximal brightness, always on).

Are you experiencing such a small battery lifetime as well? Have you done anything to improve this issue?

[rcasero]

Hi @3xpla1n ,

I think you should be getting more battery life than that, but I haven't measured mine, to be honest.

Have you checked nVidia vs. nouveau?

You can also check PowerManagement/ReducedPower. If you do, please report back, it'd be useful to know how it goes.

[antoinm]

I didn't measure precisely either how long the battery lasts with Ubuntu, but it looks like it lasts longer with Windows 10.. I'll try to take a closer look and post some details here.

[matthias-herrmann]

@antoinm great, what graphics driver are you using and which screen brightness (I'm always using max. brightness)?

[luopio]

Thanks @rcasero for the great doc! Followed most parts there for my 9560 setup.

I went directly with 17.04 and except for nvidia/intel gpu switching everything pretty much worked out of the box using the 387 version of nvidia driver.

Regarding battery life, I recommend installing powertop and running with with sudo should give you an estimated 25±5 kwh consumption. Installing and running bumblebee directly will result in a freeze during bootup. The fix is to add one kernel bootup parameter as described here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/63cavx/fixed_nvidia_1050_freezing_in_ubuntu_linux/

After adding that and installing bumblebee you should see a power consumption of 15±5 kwh. Improvising slightly I also added 387 versions to /etc/modprobe.d/bumblebee.conf, but I'm not entirely sure if this is required.

After this you can test with glxinfo and optirun glxinfo if your gpu-switching works. It saves you power but the real reason why I did it was to turn down the fan noise...