Battery life not as advertised

[Silvestru Hosszu]

Hi, I have the maxed out 13` (i7, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD) and using it mainly for work which means MS Word, Outlook and 3-4 tabs in Edge. At the beginning battery life was good but now is no more the 6 hours. I did some battery reports but everything seemed fine.
To be honest I am not very pleased.

 

[MBSMD]

Hi, I have the maxed out 13` (i7, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD) and using it mainly for work which means MS Word, Outlook and 3-4 tabs in Edge. At the beginning battery life was good but now is no more the 6 hours. I did some battery reports but everything seemed fine.
To be honest I am not very pleased.

A couple weeks ago I noticed my battery not lasting as long as normal and found the base (with the GPU) getting warm even when not using apps that activated the nVidia GPU. Found this suggestion online...

- Disconnect the tablet portion from the base and shut down.
- Boot tablet into UEFI mode (Press and hold the volume-up button on your Surface and at the same time, press and release the power button. When you see the Surface logo, release the volume-up button. The UEFI menu will display within a few seconds.)
- Shut down and reconnect tablet to base.
- Reboot normally.

The GPU base stopped warming up when just running normal desktop apps and the battery life returned to normal.

 

[skynet1511]

I bought a SB2 15" 256GB and I am also partially happy with battery life.
With video playback over Wifi (YouTube, Amazon Prime) I get around 6-7 hours. Web surfing and light office work, I can get up to 8-9 hours, but definitely not 10-12 like someone else said.
Surprisingly, I hit 15-16 hours with local video playback (mp4 1080, wifi connected, BT off, brightness at 30, adaptive brightness off), but with light-medium work with Photoshop using GPU, battery life drops down to 3.5-4 hours.
Basically I feel like until the CPU is doing super light tasks, and the Intel GPU is used, it lasts as it should close to MS benchmark, but as soon as I use a little more CPU and, in some cases, the Nvidia GPU, batteries dry much faster than what they should.

I also noticed that battery wear level after around 60 recharge cycles is around 3% on each batteries. Well… it's pretty unstable, usually it goes to 0 when batteries are 100% and I unplug the charger. But if I turn the laptop off and turn it on after 6-8 hours, they are back to 2-3%. Sometimes it goes up to 6%, one day even 9, and after 2 charges back to 0 or 2.

Does anybody have this strange behavior with battery wear level?

 

[skynet1511]

I bought a SB2 15" 256GB and I am also partially happy with battery life.
With video playback over Wifi (YouTube, Amazon Prime) I get around 6-7 hours. Web surfing and light office work, I can get up to 8-9 hours, but definitely not 10-12 like someone else said.
Surprisingly, I hit 15-16 hours with local video playback (mp4 1080, wifi connected, BT off, brightness at 30, adaptive brightness off), but with light-medium work with Photoshop using GPU, battery life drops down to 3.5-4 hours.
Basically I feel like until the CPU is doing super light tasks, and the Intel GPU is used, it lasts as it should close to MS benchmark, but as soon as I use a little more CPU and, in some cases, the Nvidia GPU, batteries dry much faster than what they should.

I also noticed that battery wear level after around 60 recharge cycles is around 3% on each batteries. Well… it's pretty unstable, usually it goes to 0 when batteries are 100% and I unplug the charger. But if I turn the laptop off and turn it on after 6-8 hours, they are back to 2-3%. Sometimes it goes up to 6%, one day even 9, and after 2 charges back to 0 or 2.

Does anybody have this strange behavior with battery wear level?