MSI GF65 C States (i5 9300h & RTX 2060 w/ 8gb of RAM)

[Torino1564]

Hi everyone, I hope you are all having a great day. So I recently purchased this new laptop and the first thing that I noticed was how bad the battery life was, so I did some research and found out that there are many things that I can do in order to improve it. Aside from all the usual performance tweaks that you see everywhere, I did a clean windows reinstall, I ran a couple debloating windows scripts, disabled many services and my startup is clean and fast. Basically, whenever I open throttlestop the c0% is around 1 and 2. Now, I still get a PKG power that changes 0.9W and 1.5W,which I know is not terrible, but after doing more research I saw that people were getting the Package C states all the way down to C8, which in my case they only drop to C3.

I have a 150mw undervolting on my CPU (intel i5 9300h) and my gpu (rtx 2060) is disabled via optimus while doing this, so Im kinda out of ideas of whats preventing the CPU to go into deeper C states. I followed a guide online about it, followed other troubleshooting steps that I found in other threads and forums (like updating nvme drivers) but nothing seems to really help. I dont know how much can be done from a forum thread without actually having access to the pc, but Im open to suggestions. I will leave some pics of my trottlestop numbers. This was done with a fully idle unplugged device with nothing opened but a few ahk scripts. I closed them afterwards but they dont really affect anything.

 

[unclewebb]

Many laptops are shipped with C states that are broken. Hardly anyone seems to notice or care. There is no point for manufacturers to spend money trying to fix these issues if no one ever complains. Something simple like one poorly written driver is enough to interfere with the C states working correctly. It is painful trying to get the C states working properly if they never worked properly to begin with. Some manufacturers disable some of the package C states deliberately. This can help achieve higher SSD benchmark scores. That can help sell more laptops. Working C states are rarely if ever mentioned in any reviews.

Here is a good guide that might help. This guide used to be on Notebook Review before that site went off line for good.

https://download.schenker-tech.de/media/faq/Guide_Improving_Battery_Life_on_Windows_Enabling_Deeper_C_States_NotebookReview.pdf

Your screenshot shows your CPU cores averaging 82.6% in the C7 state when idle which is not great. Cores can average 99% in C7 when a Windows 10 computer is idle.

Even if you never get package C8 working, try to improve average core C7. Use the Task Manager Details tab or the Windows Resource Monitor which lets you sort tasks by Average CPU usage. This might show you some task that is running in the background that really does not need to be running.

 

[(00)]

The Windows "Task Scheduler" has many tasks that need to be [Disabled]:
Disable anything with the word "Experience" in it (Your "Experience will not be good).
There are really *very few* of them that you really need.

Good luck.

(00)

 

[Torino1564]

Hi everyone, sorry for the necro and the delay, but I just wanted to update for anyone thats having a similar issue. I did a hard reset on my OS, and now my core C7 is at 99% when on idle and my PKG power dropped to 0.9W-0.8W on idle. However, even after doing all of that I still cant get my package C states to drop to C8. I updated all the drivers from the defaults, disabled all the services, removed GeForce Experience and still no luck. Meanwhile, on my second laptop (HP Pavilion) I have a super bloated Windows install and guess what, it goes to C8 without even changing the basic power settings. So yeah, Im giving up on this topic and accepting the fact that MSI clearly doesnt care about this.

 

[(00)]

To see C8 or higher, I had to use the *Balanced* profile.