X15 Battery life extremely impacted by GeForce/Nvidia Experience

[JohnDoh]

My battery life is usually around 3 hours, on power saving, with brightness at minimum. Turbo boost disabled and the CPU limited to 60% and screen set to 60hz.  Sometimes it is randomly much better so I set about figuring it out.  I have the x15 with i7 11800H, the 3070 and 240hz FHD screen.

Turns out it is Nvidia related. I installed HWinfo and set it to monitor the power usage of both the cpu and gpu as well as the total system.  What I found was the GPU was constantly waking up, almost every second.

Task manager showed nothing using it, nothing claimed to be using it.  So I started killing Nvidia processes in the Task Manager (unfortunately they come back).  My total system usage dropped from 35W to <10W.  But I was still getting GPU wake ups, just much less often.  Each time it woke, the power draw jumped from 10W to 35W and sat there for a few seconds.  Battery life now sits massively improved to around 8 hours with the same configuration.  But opening HWinfo and spam killing the processes in Task Manager until it drops the consumption.  I tried reinstalling drivers and selecting the clean install option, but no improvement.  This also persisted across a number of driver versions.  I've had the laptop for nearly 4 months now, but haven't had to time to fully investigate until now.

I removed the drivers completely in safe mode using DDU.  Reinstalled the nvidia drivers and left Geforce/Nvidia Experience out.  It may have worked with a clean install without the Experience program selected, I didn't try leaving it out until after the DDU driver wipe.

Now there aren't even and wake up calls unless I specifically use the GPU.  I haven't had a chance to fully test out the improvements, but the first couple of attempts have it sitting around 8 hours with the task killing method.  With 18% battery remaining now Windows is claiming I have over 2 hours to go and it seems pretty consistent with the rate it has fallen since the driver removal so there is a chance it is now longer.

Is this experience (pun not intended) consistent with other x15 users? 

[Jean_Intel]

Hello JohnDoh,

Thank you for posting on the Intel️® communities.  

To have a better understanding of your issue, please provide me with the following:

• When did the issue start?
• was there a major hardware or software change before the issue started?
• What are you ding at the time the unit runner for about 3 hours?
• What Nvidia tasks you deleted?
• Create a report using the Intel System Support Utility (Intel SSU)  

• Download the Intel SSU (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/18377/25293/intel-system-support-utility-for-windows.html)

• Open the application and click on "Scan" to see the system and device information. By default, Intel SSU will take you to the "Summary View." 

• Click on the menu where it says: "Summary" to change it to "Detailed View." 

• To save your scan: click on "Next"; then "Save." 

Best regards, 

Jean O.  

Intel Customer Support Technician

[Jean_Intel]

Hello JohnDoh,

I hope you are doing fine.

Were you able to check the previous post?

Let us know if you still need assistance.

Best regards, 

Jean O.  

Intel Customer Support Technician

[JohnDoh]

Hi Jean, sorry I'm on holidays and and wasn't checking emails.

When did the issue start?
Battery life has been consistently around 2-3 hours since purchase in January.

was there a major hardware or software change before the issue started?
No, the issue was pretty much out of the box. I updated drivers etc as the first step and battery life has always been in that range for light usage.

What are you ding at the time the unit runner for about 3 hours?
Basic web browsing, mixture of video and text based content.

What Nvidia tasks you deleted?
I had to spam kill them all, they kept restarting and I wasn't able to pin it on any one of them.  After clearing all nvidia drivers and software then reinstalling without the Experience app the energy draw dropped so it has to be one of the monitoring processes as part of it.  Not having that software means there are quite a few features not available.

Create a report using the Intel System Support Utility (Intel SSU)
I'll do this once I get home.

[Jean_Intel]

Hello JohnDoh,

I hope you enjoyed your holidays.

Regarding your issue, I would like to know if you experienced any performance issues after deleting the Nvidia tasks.

Also, I will be waiting for the Intel SSU report, as this will provide us with vital information about your system.

Best regards, 

Jean O.  

Intel Customer Support Technician

[JohnDoh]

Hi please find the SSU report attached.

[JohnDoh]

Had some more time for testing.  I've installed the Geforce Experience app and left the scan for games function turned off.  Still reading the lower power usage with the HWinfo sensor and seeing the longer battery life.

Nvidia driver version 512.15.

Steps taken, check power usage via HWInfo.  The Charge rate will be around -30 to -35W with 60hz, -0.40 undervolt minimum brightness at idle.

Remove all nvidia drivers in safe mode using DDU https://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html

Reinstall driver version 512.15 from nvidia.  Charge rate now sits between -6 to -10W at idle

Reinstall Geforce experience from the same package. Sign in.  Charge rate remains as above.

Geforce experience then updated to version 3.25.1.27 - Battery Boost 2.0 is enabled as is the Nvidia Overlay.  Charge rate remains the same.

HwInfo:  The sensor Charge Rate on the battery shows the current draw from the battery, it aligns with the Total System Power sensor (except inverse due to being a negative).  Which aligns reasonably well with adding the CPU and GPU individual power states and adding some overhead (screen, fans, etc)

[Ronny_G_Intel]

Hi JohnDoh,

I have HWinfo* running on an equivalent system so that I can investigate your report, see below the battery data that I am getting on a system running defaults.

With this in mind, can you provide a screenshot of your values, and please point out the specifics that I should be looking at.

Regards,

Ronny G

[JohnDoh]

The Pink highlighted figures are the main ones. 

When the GPU is correctly in the sleep state the displayed figures for GPU will read zero.  When I was having problems the listed figures for GPU were cycling on and off every few seconds.

The Charge Rate is the total system draw, when the device is in Power Saving mode with my current settings it remains around -10W, it is higher at -14W in this screenshot because I was in performance mode on power before switching over to battery.  When the system was having problems this figure never or very rarely got better than -25W.  With yours averaging around -12W I doubt yours is effected. 

[Jean_Intel]

Hello JohnDoh,

Thank you for the information provided.  

I will proceed to check the issue internally and post back soon with more details. 

Best regards, 

Jean O.  

Intel Customer Support Technician

[Jean_Intel]

Hello JohnDoh,

I hope you are doing fine.

Were you able to check the previous post?

Let us know if you still need assistance.

Best regards,

Jean O. 

Intel Customer Support Technician

[Jean_Intel]

Hello JohnDoh,

Thank you for the information provided.  

I will proceed with further investigating your issue, and I will post back soon with more details. 

Best regards, 

Jean O.  

Intel Customer Support Technician 

[Ronny_G_Intel]

Hi JohnDoh,

We are still looking into this report.

I will get back to you as soon as possible.

Regards,

Ronny G 

[JohnDoh]

Power draw by the gpu is at 0W when not being used after I cleared the Nvidia drivers and reinstalled them.  I'm still using the uniwill service.  It may well be a problem with the interaction between the uniwill service and the nvidia drivers.  The system has some issue with the driver install order since the support page has a driver pack with specific instructions for the order required.  Having drivers update afterwards as required may throw out this delicate balance.

I've never seen a system so delicate with the drivers/software.  Mine originally completely stopped controlling the system via uniwill, which meant the fans never turned on and the system could only passively throttle.  I had to reinstall the BIOS to restore that function.

Edit: It seems the comment I was replying to here has been removed.

[Chris_V_Intel]

Hi @JohnDoh,

Your case has been escalated to me. Thanks for all the great information. 

We've had another customer complain about an average 3-hour battery life and after 5 tests-running down the battery from 100%-the shortest time the battery lasted was 6 hours. On the other 4 tests, the battery lasted for at least 8 hours.

Would you be willing to completely uninstall the NVIDIA driver/experience so that only the Intel GFX driver is loaded and report how long the battery lasts? After that test, if it doesn't show anything, can you remove the Uniwill driver and NUC Software Studio (NSS) to see if that makes a difference?

Again, I'd try these myself, but I haven't seen this issue on my own systems. 

Meanwhile, I'll keep investigating. 

[JohnDoh]

Hi,

Windows automatically reinstalls a version of the Nvidia drivers whenever I remove it but they seem to be working properly.  About the only way to stop the driver from loading I think is disabling the 3070 in Device Manager.

This causes the device to begin using 42W at idle.

Preventing the uniwill service from running appears to have no effect on battery life.  Due to the number of issues I've had with it not controlling fans etc I'd prefer not to remove it when my system is working well so I just disabled the service and restarted.  I can remove it if you really need that tested.

Mine is currently working as intended with around an 8 hour battery life after I completed the DDU removal of all Nvidia drivers in safe modeas stated in the op.  I've had a couple of version updates of the nvidia drivers and intel gpu drivers and removing the drivers again for the test above didn't change anything.

[Chris_V_Intel]

@JohnDoh  Thanks for letting me know. 

I'm hesitant to ask you to do anything either. I don't want to mess it up for you!

What's DDU?

How would you like to proceed? If you're satisfied we can close the case or continue with more testing. Of course, you can always reach out again if you need anything.

Let me know and we'll go from there!

Thanks for the help!

[JohnDoh · Accepted solution]

DDU is Display Driver Uninstaller from guru3D.  It is an application that clears out all selected display drivers when used in safe mode.  It does a better job of removing left overs that can be causing problems than just uninstalling or selecting the clean install option when updating drivers.

https://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html

I'm happy to mark this as resolved.  I had the solution in my OP, was more looking to see if it was a consistent problem or just my luck.  Seems there are a few other complaints floating around about the battery life and this is a likely culprit, but I don't know exactly what caused the issue or how to replicate it.

[Chris_V_Intel]

@JohnDoh 

Got it, thanks for the FYI.

Thanks for letting us all know about the issue and how you addressed it. If for some reason we do find there's an issue we'll note it here.