1
Just recently, I have noticed that my battery life has gone down the drain on my Alienware 15r2 laptop. It used to be able to last me a whole day, 4-6 hours browsing the web or using Google docs. But now it barely lasts 2 hours. I have noticed that it has getting warmer for the light use, with CPU and GPU temps in the upper 50°C, but CPU and GPU loads are 0-10%. I downloaded BatMon, a battery monitoring software, and I left my laptop normally how I used it during these light sessions, and it showed the discharge rate was in between 32000 and 36000 mW, which is high. I did the same tasks on my dad's business laptop, which has similar specs, and it only drew about 14000mW. I have not installed any new programs besides batmon, but I changed my power profile from balanced to power saver before the problem started. I tried updating drivers and firmware, but no change. I then closed all background processes like Google drive, CCleaner, etc, and still no change. Anyone have an idea why consumption and temps are so high?
Laptop specs: I7-6700HQ, GTX 970M, 32Gb ram, Intel 600P 500gb SSD, 1tb hdd, 1080p display, 96Whr battery
My dad's laptop: I7-6820HQ, Quadro M1000M, 1Tb nvme m.2 ssd, 16gb ram, 1080p display, 90Whr battery
~~EDIT~~ Today I just tore apart the laptop to see what the thermal compound situation is, and it is horrible. I found my heating problem. The surfaces of both chips are barely covered in any paste. No wonder why my temps are horrible.
I cannot add the other images since I do not have more than 10 reputation.
~~SOLUTION EDIT~~ As said in the comments down below, I replaced the thermal compound for the high temperature issue and cleaned up dust from the heatsinks. Temperatures are now much more stable than they used to be, and they dropped 10+ degrees C. For the battery consumption issue, reinstalling windows seems to have fixed the problem. Idle power usages are in between 9 and 16 watts, much much better than the mid 30s I was getting. Thanks everyone for the help!
which powerplan do you use? high perf or balanced? or a special one from Dell? does the cpu clock down to save power? – magicandre1981 – 2017-03-03T16:09:42.453
Ever since the problem started, i have been using the battery save power plan, but that did not change anything. I even have battery saver in windows 10 option turned on all the time, but that also has not made any difference. I used to use high performance plan before the issue popped up. – nern9 – 2017-03-03T17:34:10.923
ok, remove the old paste and add new one. but only a bit, otherwise it would isolate and not improve cooling – magicandre1981 – 2017-03-04T07:17:18.990