Aero Series battery life problem fixed

If any one noticed that their laptops' battery life is only about 4 hours,maybe my solution can help you.

I think it is the problem of the Nvidia driver and the power management system. It seems that the latest Nvidia driver can not work well with the power management system. To check this, you can open the smart manager and click smart dashboard. When using the battery, if the temperature of the GPU is always shown, that means the GPU is working and eating the battery life. When it is shown as 'idel', the Nvidia GPU does not eat battery life. Another important thing is that, if you installed Wake GPU (for 8th intel version) or emptyproject11 (for v7), these two software makes your Nvidia GPU always work to prevent mouse freezing problem, which means it makes the GPU eats battery life. So, if you want more battery life, uninstall it. What I do is uninstall it when I use battery and reinstall it when I use external power supply. It is quick because the software is very small.

So here are some important points:
1. Check the GPU temperature in the smart dashboard. If it never show as 'idel'. It means your GPU is always working and eating battery life.
2. Uninstall the latest Nvidia driver, use the one on the gigabyte website. Or just use smart update to install the driver. The version I use is 23.21.13.8892.
3. Uninstall the Wake GPU or emptyproject11 when you use battery.

Now my laptop's battery life is about 10 hours on balanced mode.

 

I'd like to share you some story behind emptyproject11.
In certain build of Window about 3 or 4 months ago, our test team found a issue when browsing desktop - the showup of right-click menu is a little bit slower(laggy) and we surprisingly found it was due to the weak support of Optimus (or Microsoft Hybrid) from Windows. However MS team has no short-term solution to it so we just made something which could awake GPU always......which is the prototype of emptyproject11. After that MS team finally come up the solution to iGPU and dGPU switch in the new build of Windows(also from NV's team) so the power consumption back to normal

 

How do I know if my aero 15x v8 is affected by this? I have checked task manager and services tabs but no empty project. Exe running however the GPU temperature is always downs in the smart manager. Nvidia monitor says the GPU is "inactive" but GPUZ log shows minor usage ( gpu core Clock139.0 mhz and GPU memory clock 202.mhz): every other second.

I checked in Smart manager folder, empty project. Exe is there but I'm not sure if I should universal/rename/remove it.

 

Try to sleep and start it back, and if you use GPU-z it will activate the nvidia gpu at lowest clock, so try hwinfo

 

2019 04 new Aero 15X
Reinstalled everything, forced use of iGPU in Nvida control panel, and even disabled the 1070 and still battery life is 3-4 hours doing low-level business stuff.
It's a shame, but this is going back for a refund.

 

I just wanted to share an interesting finding regarding battery consumption for those of you who get around 3h on battery. I am on Windows 1903 and have newest Nvidia Studio drivers (26.21.14.3186) as they are optimized for Adobe Lightroom. The downside of having new drivers, as some of you experience, is that the battery is drained more heavily when on battery (no AC). Even disabling the Nvidia dGPU via DevManView at first does nothing (strangely maybe even increases consumption a little) and still show a discharge of around 30W as seen in HWiNFO.
HOWEVER, if you restart the notebook AFTER you disabled the dGPU the discharge is similar maybe even a little bit higher, BUT if you ENABLE the dGPU now, the discharge drops after a couple of seconds (first you notice an increase) to around 15W. Et voila, now it lasts twice as long! Note that disabling the dGPU again increase consumption again, which I find very strange.

Please report, if this has helped you. Also, if someone, can figure out or inform me why consumption does not decrease (even increase) when disabling dGPU when started with enabled dGPU? Anyone who can figure a way to decrease discharge without restarting after disabled dGPU is also very welcome.

 

I have the v7 version (i7-7700 HQ and GTX 1070 max q). So far the first solution did not work for me. My GPU is always idle in the smart manager but my battery capacity is still around 3 hours. I have installed the latest Nvidia and Intel
graphics driver but it does not fix the problem. I don't use HWinfo app but rather used battery bar app to measure my poower consumption. So far when on battery my discharge rate is around -9000 mW up to 12000 mW. I don't know what is happening with my machine but I know this is just a software issue. The last time my laptop was on 7-8 hours battery capacity is when I have installed the NVIDIA driver 388.92. I'm planning to revert to that but I think I will have some problems playing the newer games.

I am very disappointed with this laptop given that I've also encountered hardware problems in the keyboard. This battery issue is just like adding a salt to a wound. The worst of all is that Gigabyte service is not even answering my inquiries. It looks like they only care about the newer models (v8 and RTX aero laptops)

I haven't tried the latest solution and I still think that it is not a permanent fix either. Gigabyte should address this issue by giving a bios update or anyting and think they should still support the older generation Aero 15x. This is not what I expect from a 2200$ laptop.

I hope someone can help me on this because I am starting to lose hope in Gigabyte.

 

If your discharge rate is between -9000 and -12000mW your battery should last between 8 and 10hours, since the battery has 94000mwh. I also use BatteryBar and noticed that I had to turn off "statistische Laufzeiteinschätzung" (the second setting from the top) to get the accurate estimated hours. While turned on it displayed the same ~3 hours as the Windows settings.

 

What do you mean by turning off the "statistische Laufzeiteinschätzung"? I can't find it in the battery bar option. I am only using the free version by the way. So far it still displays 3 hour battery capacity despite having 9,000 mW to 12,000 mW discharge rate.

 

Just an update. For an unknown reason, the discharge rate just spiked to -25,414mW to 29,000mw. The battery bar still indicates 3 hour battery capacity. This is just outrageous.