Battery life on Dell XPS 9560

Ask Fedora Ask in English
,
1

Hi everybody!

I installed Fedora a month ago on my Dell XPS 155 9560 and I’m currently using it at work and at home.
I haven’t had any issues for now, except the battery life that is incredibly low (less than 2 hours).
My Dell has an integrated Intel graphic card and an Nvidia dedicated card. Before using Fedora I was an Ubuntu user, and I remember that disabling the Nvidia card in favour of the integrated card gave me a lot of battery life (around 6 to 7 hours), so I wanted to do the same with Fedora.

This is my grub configuration file:

    GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
    GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR="$(sed 's, release .*$,,g' /etc/system-release)"
    GRUB_DEFAULT=saved
    GRUB_DISABLE_SUBMENU=true
    GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="console"
    GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="resume=/dev/mapper/fedora-swap rd.lvm.lv=fedora/root rd.lvm.lv=fedora/swap rhgb quiet nvidia.modeset=0 nouveau.modeset=0 intel.modeset=1 acpi_rev_override=5"
    GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true"
    GRUB_ENABLE_BLSCFG=true

This is the output of the command sudo lspci | grep -A3 VGA:

    00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 630 (rev 04)
    00:04.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/E3-1500 v5/6th Gen Core Processor Thermal Subsystem (rev 05)
    00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 100 Series/C230 Series Chipset Family USB 3.0 xHCI Controller (rev 31)
    00:14.2 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation 100 Series/C230 Series Chipset Family Thermal Subsystem (rev 31)

So it seems that the Intel graphic card is set as default as I want, but for some reason my battery life still sucks.
I dug a little into the internet and I found out that I don’t have any Xorg configuration related to my graphic card, the only configuration file I have in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ is 00-keyboard.conf that defines the system keyboard.

May this be the solution to my problem? Is there anything else I can do? Will the following file content be enough for Xorg to recognize my graphic card?

Section "Device"
  Identifier "Intel Graphics"
  Driver "intel"
EndSection

If you need anything else just ask.
Thank you in advance!

2

I am not a hardware expert, but I think I might have heard that even if your system uses the Intel card, the Nvidia is not completely switched off and it can consume power.

Check this link to get more info.

2 Likes