Battery Life Benchmark
So, I’m throwing in an updated battery life benchmark here because I discovered something really interesting. You can read my findings about the G14 and its issues in more detail in my standalone article, but basically there are certain pieces of software that prevent the 2060 from idling, which makes the G14 consume more power. One of those pieces of software happens to be the latest Ryzen 4000 drivers from AMD, which I found extremely problematic. Installing up to date drivers should never come at the cost of nearly 2 hours of battery life.
However, I looked into seeing if I could fix the poor battery life issue. I decided to test my hypothesis that the new control panel and its hardware monitor was preventing the 2060 from idling (just like MSI Afterburner), and what I did was kill the three Radeon background processes with Task Manager. The results speak for themselves.
Battery life using the new driver with all the Radeon processes killed actually improved battery life by half an hour… compared to our best case stock configuration. That is really impressive. Almost 7 hours of 4K video streaming is unheard of in a gaming laptop. And the improvement from just closing three background processes was 2 hours. For some users, this could definitely be worth it, but it should be noted that every reboot requires these background processes to be killed or else battery life will be much lower, not slightly higher.
Another thing I discovered about battery life (the very night before this article went up) is that Steam will also drain battery life horribly. It seems to tie up a bunch of the Vega 8 iGPU’s resources and might also pin its clock speed at 1750 MHz. Ever since I got the G14, I experienced an issue where my battery life would tank to 2-3 hours after playing a game and I believe this is the cause. To be clear, this is fixed by merely closing Steam by click the x in the top right, there isn’t a need to go through task manager. Unfortunately, since I discovered this issue right before this article went up, I haven’t tested it, but I would expect similar battery life to what you see with MSI Afterburner running in the background.
