Battery life

[Emin309]

i bought yesterdey OMEN by HP 15-dh0201ng model and i think i have a battery problem. When i turn off my RGB keyboard and just surfing on the internet it goes only about 2 hours. For example battery shows 1hr 49 min then after 2 minutes it shows 1hr 43 min.I think my battery runs out quickly.Is that ok?

[huey_placard]

Looks like yours has the RTX 2060, which is probably just a little worse than mine (GTX 1660 ti).  With these there is no way to switch temporarily over to the internal UHD 630 graphics unfortunately.  (for those that have GTX 1650 however you can)

I know what you mean, it feels like watching the charge go down about 1% per minute sometimes.  

********** By the way, can you make sure you have the Omen Command Center closed?   Surprisingly I'm finding this seems to use almost 10W of power, just by being open (especially if you leave it on the Network Boost tab where it's even higher).   This power usage when open makes no sense to me.  It even happens when I have just the keyboard backlighting adjustment tab selected in the command center, which isn't monitoring any vitals or anything.  

I've been making some measurements about what features draw what power.  I'll share in a day or two.  I find that the display brightness doesn't play as much of a role as I expected but I definitely avoid max brightness when on battery   Regarding the RGB backlighting, you have it off which is good.  I find that if I crank it up to max brightness, it is around 7W, but if I lower the brightness to fairly low on the scale (which I can still see fine) it consumes very little, maybe less than 1W. 

Also, somewhere I have the settings for Optimal Power, as opposed to max performance etc..   This might have been in the Nvidia control panel, I need to go look.  I'm assuming this helped a little.  I've been leaving it there.   

I'm planning on implementing some aggressive battery saving to see what happens.  By that I mean have a very short screen timeout etc..  Mine has both a SDD and HDD.    I'd like to know if there is a way to keep the HDD from ever spinning up at all until I actually want to use it for something, so that way I don't feel bad about frequently waking up / shutting down / waking up / shutting down.   I  find using the PIN# password when waking up to be not much of an annoyance,

I really wish there was a way to temporarily switch to internal graphics on these models, because that makes a big difference.   A lot of the competition offers it for the GTX 1660ti card (and probably RTX 2060 too).  But not the Omen.

[GSynergy]

Hmm, it seems like HP's boasts about the battery life aren't exactly true, so you should take them with a grain of salt.

On my 17t-an100, I have found it takes exactly 55 minutes to deplete the battery from 100% to 0% in the batter/power saving mode, doing common tasks such as: listening to music, looking at photos, browsing the web with an ad-blocker, not gaming or doing anything that would normally require a lot of CPU/GPU power draws. 

Screen brightness plays a big role, as does if you have an USB devices plugged in. If running on battery power, try switching to "Best Battery" mode by clicking on the battery icon in the taskbar. 

I find it best to use OMEN laptops plugged in at all times, as their batteries tend to be a bit weak/underpowered, even when there has been a very low amount of battery cycles made. (check HP support assistant, and click the battery, to run the battery checker, then click "show advanced information" to view your capacity, and health.)

[huey_placard]

I notice that the latest Omen laptops (like the one that Emin309 listed) have a 6 cell battery instead of 4 cell, thus higher voltage, but the same capacity rating.   I wonder if that will make much difference to battery life.   I assume hp went to 6 cell in order to support the new 12V cooling fans (previous version had 5V fans). 

Anyway, I've been experimenting with model 15-dc1057nr  (still the 4-cell design) that I'm probably going to return now.   It's a really tough decision.   That one still has the i7-9750H, but for the GPU it has the GTX 1650 .   This model still supports Optimus.   I got it because I was convinced that battery life was more important to me than the difference in GPU capability between the GTX 1660 ti and GTX 1650.    ( The GTX 1660 ti is still in the return window.  Normally I don't play these kind of games with returns, but at the time I didn't realize the GTX 1660 ti version wouldn't support Optimus, and this is a really big investment for us that we want to get right).

Anyway, on the GTX 1650 version, when I switch it to UHD 630 integrated graphics for casual use / browsing, the battery life so far seems to be fantastic compared to the GTX 1660 ti version.   I can use it for a long time and not feel worried at all about what's happening to the battery charge.   And at times where I need the GPU capacity, it's really quick to switch to the GTX 1650 which requires a quick reboot.  

But now I'm torn because I like the benchmarking I'm seeing with the GTX 1660 ti.  I wish HP hadn't disabled Optimus on this version.