Struggling with optimizing battery life on HP Envy 16 - i7 13700H

[yesyesokay]

Hey there,

I've been looking to improve my laptop's battery life from a measly 2.5h (vs the 10h advertised), which led me to start looking into CPU power draw.

Despite everything I tried (excluding undervolting, which I haven't done yet), the impact on PKG Power and C0%is little to negligible.

Here's what my ThrottleStop window looks like:

Sorry if i'm just throwing terms like that without knowing what I'm saying, but I'm desperate to improve the battery life as this is my college laptop.

Laptop Specs:
Model: HP ENVY 16-h1xxx
CPU: i7 13700h
RAM: 64 GB DDR5 5200Mhz (I'm sure this has impact on battery life but not as severely as I experienced)
GPU: Nvidia Geforce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU
Storage: 2 1TB NVME SSDs, one from KIOXIA and another from WD

 

[unclewebb]

You have a couple of P cores spending too much idle time working on something that is probably not necessary. When the CPU is loaded like this when it is supposed to be idle, battery drain can be significant. Use Process Explorer to track down what is running in the background on your computer. One poorly written program or poorly written driver is all it takes to drain the battery.

Process Explorer - Sysinternals

Find out what files, registry keys and other objects processes have open, which DLLs they have loaded, and more.

learn.microsoft.com

Autoruns is another great program from Sysinternals. It can be a useful tool to disable Windows startup apps that do not need to be running 24/7 when you boot up.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/autoruns

undervolting

The 13th Gen H series do not support undervolting. Intel removed undervolting from all of the 12th Gen and newer mobile H series CPUs.

 

[yesyesokay]

Hey there,

Thank you for your reply. I've been trying to identify any possible issues, but so far nothing particularly stands out except the system's CPU usage.

 

[yesyesokay]

Update: After signing out, closing all non-essential background tasks and opening up ThrottleStop & Process Explorer both my PKG Power and C0% are about 40% lower. I'm also seeing some C3s, C6s, and C8s on the C states compared to a constant 0.

Though I still don't know if they're within normal levels for an (almost-idle) pc.

 

[unclewebb]

You are making progress. There is still something running in the background on your computer that is using too many CPU cycles. You just have to keep going through the list of items running on your computer and figuring out which items need to be running all of the time and which items can be disabled. Having to manually start something when you actually need to use it is better than having it run all of the time in the background if you rarely use it.

I prefer using Google Chrome to Microsoft Edge. Chrome has an option to exit all background tasks when I am not using it. Edge likes to start multiple tasks and leaves them running in the background. I am not sure if Edge has an option to disable this behavior.

I am not a fan of using ThrottleStop to set Speed Shift EPP to 255. A slow and sluggish CPU is an inefficient CPU. It might not save any power doing this. I prefer not to check the Speed Shift EPP box. This lets Windows manage this setting so Windows and ThrottleStop do not have to fight over what Speed Shift EPP value the CPU should be using. Allowing a CPU to process background tasks quickly when it needs to helps improve the C state residency percentages. Your CPU package spending some time in package C10 is a big improvement.