Interesting, never had that happen to me, but then perhaps you are using a laptop with a dgpu? I have not been. My laptop generally consumes 4w at idle and up to 15w under load, so I don’t see this ever outpacing the 60w charger. The CPUs with the highest tdp are only around 100w anyway right? And in that case the laptop comes with a higher wattage charger. But you’re right I guess it could happen depending on the hardware, never personally seen it however.
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fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 8 months agoPower consumption. Especially with turbo boost power consumption can easily spike well above what the power brick can deliver, so the battery is used like a capacitor. Or shit even without the spikes chargers can’t keep up. My laptop will actually discharge under full load with the full 240 watt charger.
It’s not normally an issue on REALLY low end devices (sub core i, like pentiums or atoms), but anything high end will reduce it’s power consumption without a batter installed.
appel@whiskers.bim.boats 8 months ago
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 8 months ago
It even happens with power efficient devices. All Macbooks will run at their lowest clock speed with a dead/low battery (even my M1), My Thinkpad T14 with an ULV CPU and it’s odd. It tries to limit total system power to around 25 watts, even though I have a 100 watt power supply connected. My theory is that since 30 watts is the lowest power supply it will run off of it’s trying to keep that 5 watt buffer. Unfortunately that means my CPU runs at 800mhz doing anything but idling. Laptops with dGPUs often just wont work at all, or are so far limited they’re unusable.
Some older laptops like my Thinkpad X220 will run at 800mhz on a 65 watt charger, but on a 90 watt charger it will run at full speed. But unfortunately in the days of USB C that makes things a lot more difficult.
possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
That’s not something that should ever happen on most devices. If your battery is discharging under load you likely have a faulty device.
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 8 months ago
There’s nothing wrong with the device, Lenovo has confirmed this, and both motherboards my laptop has had have the same “problem”. This isn’t my only machine like this either, 16" Intel MacBook Pros are also known to discharge under full load, but that’s because they’re limited to 100 watt USB C.
There’s a reason why those devices run at minimum clock speeds when their battery is sub 5%.
possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
That’s a terrible design then. I would never want a device that would do that
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Well I hope you don’t like ThinkPads…