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Comment by bvrmn | Hacker News Reader

BTW I get 19 hours from DELL XPS and Latitude. It's Linux with custom DE and Vim as IDE though.

I get about 21 hours from mine, it's running Windows but powered off.

This is why Apple can be slightly more honest about their battery specs, they don’t have the OS working against them. Unfortunately most DELLs XPS will be running Windows, so it is still misleading to provide specs based on what the hardware could do if not sabotaged.

I wonder if it’s like webpages. The numbers are calculated before marketing adds the crapware and ruins all of your hard work.

can you share more details about your setup?

Archlinux, mitigations (spectre alike) off, X11, OpenBox, bmpanel with only CPU/IO indicator. Light theme everywhere. Opera in power save mode. `powertop --auto-tune` and `echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo` Current laptop is Latitude 7390.

Right, so you are disabling all performance features and effectively turning your CPU into a low–end low–power SKU. Of course you’d get better battery life. It’s not the same thing though.

> echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo

Isn't that going to torch performance? My i9-9900 has a base frequency of 3.6 Ghz and a turbo of 5.0 Ghz. Disabling the turbo would create a 28% drop in performance.

I suppose if everything else on the system is configured to use as little power as possible, then it won't even be noticed. But seeing as CPUs underclock when idle (I've seen my i9 go as low as 1.2 Ghz), I'm not sure disabling turbo makes a significant impact except when your CPU is being pegged.

That's the point. I have no performance bottleneck with no_turbo. My i5 tends to turn on turbo mode and increased power demand (heat leaks) even if it's no needed. For example with no_turbo laptop is always cold and fan basically stays silent. With turbo it easily gets 40C warm while watching YT or doing my developer stuff, building docker containers and so.

I get 20 minutes from my Dell (not the XPS), with Vim. When it was brand-new, I got 40 minutes. A piece of hot garbage, with an energy-inefficient intel cpu..

Frankly that sounds like you got a lemon. Even the most inefficient gaming laptops get over an hour under a full gaming workload.

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