High Power Usage Dell XPS 17 9570

Hi! I’m having terrible battery life on my Dell XPS 15 9570, running 5.10 and i3. My battery capacity is ok, so I shouldnt be getting the 1-2 hrs I do right now. I looked at powertop and it says that I am using a high amount of power, so I think the nvidia GPU may not be properly turned off. I am using optimus-select with the aspci call option right now to turn it off. Is the GPU properly turned off? How can I extend my battery life?

Battery stats:

+++ Battery Status: BAT0
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/manufacturer                   = LGC-LGC3.67
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/model_name                     = DELL T453X
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/cycle_count                    =      0 (or not supported)
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_full_design             =   7894 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_full                    =   4870 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_now                     =   3820 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/current_now                    =   3040 [mA]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/status                         = Discharging

Powertop:

The battery reports a discharge rate of 44.8 W
The energy consumed was 0.00 J
The estimated remaining time is 0 hours, 59 minutes

Summary: 4607.0 wakeups/second,  0.0 GPU ops/seconds, 0.0 VFS ops/sec and 5

Power est.              Usage       Events/s    Category       Description
  32.3 W     61.0%                      Device         Display backlight
  1.12 W    100.0%                      Device         Radio device: btusb
  848 mW      5.1 pkts/s                Device         Network interface: w
 27.5 mW    190.3 ms/s     2746.3       Process        [PID 2054] picom -b

I’m having similar performance with my dell xps 17 9720. Are you using sleep often? It might be related to this topic I opened recently, and nvidia also seems to be the culprit there. Still haven’t found a satisfactory way to fix this though

Thanks, but I don’t think its the same issue. This happens even if I use the laptop for 3 continuous hours, and my laptop is cool when asleep.

well but this tells a different story

/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_full_design             =   7894 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_full                    =   4870 [mAh]

this means your battery capacity has only 61% of a new one left.

Yeah that’s fair. Is the discharge rate supposed to be as high as it is? Since even a new battery would discharge in a couple of hours at this rate

Pleased have a look Dell XPS 17 (9720) - ArchWiki

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