Recently I bought Thinkpad E15 with Ryzen 4700u CPU and 8GB Ram.
I needed a new laptop for coding and working mobile when I needed it.
When I see the Ryzen 4700u with a really really good price I just clicked buy.
I knew a Ram and SSD upgrade was possible. Right after ordering the Thinkpad, I ordered an 8GB ram stick so I can make the laptop 16GB ram.
Increasing ram more than you need is a key to creating a better performance and battery life.
If you just want to read the solution go to the end of the page Solution section. Enjoy…
Disaster Starting
Well, then the laptop came I was very happy I got a new ThinkPad.
I always wanted to get a ThinkPad. I started setting up the device.
It came with Windows 11 and I hate it I wanted to try a bit first made some tests install programs, and made benchmarks. The laptop didn’t pass the 3-hour or 4-hour battery time.
This may seem normal but the worst E15 Thinkpads easily see 6+ hour battery time. I researched a lot before buying.
I knew something was wrong I started to check everything.
Removing programs, optimizing power management. But no, the problem still here battery dies very fast whatever I do.
Then I started to see a pattern with the CPU. The CPU is very high and the CPU clock runs very fast.
Usually, Ryzen CPUs are very good and power-efficient but whoever set up this is fucked up.
Maybe in the store may be in the factory. I don’t know.
But what I know is the CPU preset is fucked. It is not running normally and eating the battery fast.
Even if I don’t run anything or only run like 3 tabs on chrome CPU is still hot.
Problem Continuing
After trying everything with Windows 11 I decided to install Windows 10.
I think maybe it is the OS not set up properly.
I installed Win 10 installed drivers, made updates, and started running tests again.
Nope CPU is still hot.
Then I decided it is the bios CPU preset or something. At least this eliminates the store probability. At this point, I am %100 sure the factory fucked up the CPU preset.
One of the most efficient Laptop CPUs is running like a PC and it only have 50mm fan 🙃
The worst thing about it is not the heat it’s the fan noise. I hate fan noise…
I checked the bios and CPU preset and tried every setting. power management and battery-saving settings. Didn’t work because almost all laptop bios are customized. Because the motherboards are customized. Everything is custom-built.
You cant just set up CPU clocks and presets easily like in the PC Bios.
This makes optimizing laptops very very hard.
In most laptops, you cant even install a fan controller and set up the RPM.
That’s the reality of laptops.
The Happy Solution
After this point trying every possible thing I started to research.
The solution came from the open-source community.
https://github.com/JamesCJ60/AMD-APU-Tuning-Utility
I love open source. <3
This tool is called AATU. AMD Tuning Utility.
It supports not just laptop Ryzen CPUs but PC Ryzen CPUs too. The full list is here check.
I installed the utility just used the default preset and applied it.
I used with default preset to optimize my CPU and APU but you can use this tool for more performance.
If you have very good cooling on your PC you can even make extreme tuning too 🙂
People are using this tool to get extra FPS on games.
But for me, I just need to optimize my CPU preset so it doesn’t run on a higher clock and heat up for no reason.
It just worked. It lowered my CPU to 1.9 GHz it runs on a lower clock speed. This may seem very low but its not 🙂
Ryzen 4700u is a crazy powerful CPU. It has 8 cores so even at lower clock speed it has the power for anything.
But I don’t need it I will just write code on this laptop. I will run VS Code, Docker, XAMMP, and NODE.js that’s it.
So optimizing this CPU is more logical for my case.
After the setup CPU started to cool down. There was no heat on the keyboard or back side of the laptop under the CPU.
I charged the battery to 100% to make another test before sleeping. I opened a very long 12hour youtube video and set the brightness to 40% and just let it run on battery. Then I go to sleep.
When I woke up I checked the laptop battery was on %9 and it was running 8 hours 30 min nonstop.
This is how I increase my Ryzen CPU laptop battery life to 9 hours.
I think this shows how important setting up the CPU efficiently. On most laptops and phones CPU uses more power than the screen. When it is set up badly it just fucks the battery life.
Most people have no idea how to investigate all of these things and find this solution.
That’s why I wanted to share this problem and solution with the interwebs…
Thanks for reading have a great day…
1 comment
jack
thank you man this was very very helpful