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Questions about T480 Battery, few other things (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by kzhe@lemm.ee to c/thinkpad@lemmy.ml

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I'm planning to purchase a used T480, and want to know how the battery life would be on Linux. Online I see a lot of good numbers, and I am considering carrying multiple of the external batteries, but I want another opinion. Also, do you have any recommends on a good price to "go for it" and any other laptops to consider (up to but preferably well under 600 USD, good battery/portability, linux) to consider.

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[–] Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I think battery life is a non issue on modern laptops unless you're doing heavy workloads (YouTube, 3d, etc). With TLP and working C states, my random 11th gen cheap acer gets ~10h on idle, ~6h on normal use, and 2-4h with heavy workloads

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My 10th gen T14 gen 1 struggles to get more than 4 hours doing just about anything. 11th gen is supposed to be better, but my 11950h P1 gets truly awful battery life (sub 2 hours typically).

Intel in particular struggles to get good battery life, AMD is much better. On Intel machines if there's never a complete idle for the laptop to race to it's just going to run as fast as it can forever until it dies. AMD isn't as stupid and has better under load power consumption, but not as great idle.

[–] Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

have you checked if your laptop uses C states correctly?

Is the cpu governor set to powersave?

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is in windows so everything is already preconfigured.

And yes I get worse to the same battery life in linux unless I go insane with the settings and get awful performance too.

[–] Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

ah, my bad.

I don't know why your T14 has that bad of a battery life, but pretty sure the H series of intel CPUs have really high power usage in general