I wonder what kind of battery-life Framework users get?
I've recently gotten an Elitebook 845 G10 which runs on a Ryzen 7 Pro 7840HS, and battery life was at first shit. The issue was with the BIOS being bugged and not allowing ASPM. After manually activating, I now get around 12-15 hours on a 50Wh battery, depending on use of course. Results still preliminary though, more testing needs to be done.
Btw, I chose the Elitebook because it actually features great repairability. Pretty much everything can be swapped out, including memory. I was reluctant to buy HP, mostly due to the reputation they earned with their printer business shenanigans, but so far don't regret the purchase at all. In fact I like this device more and more.
Pretty much everything worked out of the box with ArchLinux, except for ASPM, which I was able to fix within a couple hours.
edit: Oh and the main motivation behind preferring the Elitebook over the Framework was the price. I mean really? Upgrade to 7840 almost 400 Euro? Lenovo charges like 80 Euro for that. For 1200 Euro I got the aforementioned CPU with a beautiful 120hz, 500nits, 2560x1600 screen, 2x16GB 5600 DDR5 SO-DIMM, 1TB NVME, etc. But it was a student offer.
I have the 845 g9, and I'm lukewarm about it. It's more to do with AMD than HP, but HP also has a few annoyances.
- No insert key
- No external display before OS. Can't do luks password over external monitor.
- Miscellaneous AMD bugs: vp9 hw decoding broken, s2idle sleep fails occasionally, gets stuck in lowest frequency sometimes, several others that have slowly been fixed on mainline
- Battery life is pretty mediocre. 5-6 hours of browsing, 2-3 hours of video.
I have the same laptop, and while the BIOS/UEFI indeed doesn't activate any external monitors, Linux does it during boot before LUKS password prompt for me… not sure what the difference is? I'm on kernel 6.4.
There's also a firmware upgrade (the kind in /lib/firmware, not the kind in flash memory on the card) for the QCNFA765 wifi card that you have to install, which fixes both a lot (probably not all) of the s2idle issues, and gives a little bit of battery life. I found this out with some s0ix test tool that I now can't find… anyway, it should say in dmesg:
Also, as some siblings already posted, Insert is on Fn+F10, which does indeed suck… but funnily enough it is also (undocumented?) on Fn+E, where it was on previous HP Elitebooks. I find that slightly more useful due to being reachable one-handed…
Maybe it's some interaction with the dock ? My external monitor is behind the hp tb4 dock. The wifi firmware is just the linux firmware, right ? I use Fedora, so it should be pretty up to date. s2idle is mostly fine, it's just that it'll randomly fail to sleep and the laptop will have a drained battery the next day when I open it.
> No external display before OS. Can't do luks password over external monitor.
Just a guess, but is the monitor over HDMI or USB C / Thunderbolt? If the later, there may be BIOS settings to enable it before boot is completed (IIRC on Dells it's disabled).
> - No external display before OS. Can't do luks password over external monitor.
That's weird. I have the g8 and there is no such issue. I routinely type my LUKS password on my external keyboard and monitor. The only thing that doesn't show up on the external screen IIRC is the boot selection menu.
The insert key seems to be fn-f10 now. I have to say I don't really ever use it? What do people use it for, if I may ask? I configure everything to use vim-style editing, so maybe that's why.
I can't really speak on the display stuff, but I fell like I saw something related to that in the BIOS. Haven't had issues with sleep either, but maybe because I've only been using the machine for 2 days.
About the battery, I really wonder if ASPM is off for you as well? It seems to be a common theme among HP Laptops. My battery life nearly doubled when I set it up.
ctrl + shift + ins doesn't work on this laptop. That's what I use to paste in the terminal. You can also do ctrl + shift + v, which I am trying to learn now. I also see a bunch of spurious corrected aer messages, for which I've had to add a noaer kernel boot arg. On ASPM, maybe PCIe ASPM doesn't work ? Not sure. Here's dmesg.
[ 0.362132] ACPI FADT declares the system doesn't support PCIe ASPM, so disable it
That's exactly what mine showed when ASPM wasn't enabled. Before that I got at most about 9 hours doing nothing, after enabling it I got about 14 hours even doing light webbrowsing and such.
I made a Reddit post about it today, enabling it under Linux manually. Many people have been complaining about low battery life on the Elitebook 845 G10, and most people suspected missing ASPM support to be the culprit. The nice thing is, under Linux you can force it, even if the BIOS doesn't offer it. I'm still testing though, so it is pretty experimental. You can find instructions on what I did here, if you're interested: https://old.reddit.com/r/AMDLaptops/comments/16lz0oh/anyone_...
Apologies, it is a pretty long post.
e: And I don't know if this generalizes to G9 laptops
Thank you very much for that, my G9 hovers around 5 W idle which is not great. I will try these tweaks.
Note that there is a GUI app called "Power Statistics" that shows the evolution of power consumption on battery quite well. It still uses data reported by the battery which is not super accurate but works well enough when looking at say an hour of data points.
Thanks. I'll try this out. For my next purchase, I'm going to stick to an Intel Thinkpad. I still use my 10 year old T530, and I bought this to replace it, but I still find myself using the T530 most of the time.
This is so annoying, I use a Firefox extension for Youtube called "Your Codecs." that allows to block VP9 so I can keep hardware decoding on without having random GPU crashes.
I've got the 13th gen intel model so can't talk about amd battery life but I can get at least 4 hours out of the battery most of the time and for me that's good since I tend to be running between 1 and 4 vms constantly humming away using cpu cycles. I have played with tlp and bet if I lightened my load and capped the cpu I'd be able to get 6 to 8 hours without an issue but I bought the thing for the speed so I'll stick with it zooming along instead of a long battery life.
4 hours isn’t awful but still isn’t great unfortunately.
I hope to get a few more good years out my MacBook Pro (m1 Pro).
The thing is fast and I can do a full 8 hour work day with VSCode, IntelliJ, and docker running a ton of stuff:
- a couple MySQL instances
- multiple elastic search and Kibana instances
- Haproxy
- a few Nginx + PHP containers
- a node container with frontend dev build
- logstash
- a couple rust services
I can close the lid and come back the next day having lost essentially no battery life, and everything running just as I left it.
I have the 845 G8 and can echo most of your sentiment. It's a fast, well made and easily repairable/upgradable machine (ie. no soldered RAM modules).
However, HP's software is less than stellar. What annoys me the most is the fact that the latest BIOS update completely broke USB-C dock and monitor detection.
I'm typing this on one of those, and on paper it's indeed a nice little machine. But oh my god, the screen is ridiculously bad. When I got it a few years ago, I didn't think it was still possible to have such atrocious screens on a 1500+ € machine...
Also, assembly quality seems hit or miss with these. Mine is OK, but on the one from work, the black plastic surrounding the screen is misaligned with the hinge.
I use it for login and sudo. The placement of the reader could be better. On my old ThinkPad it was right next to the keyboard, on the Elitebook it is below it for some reason.
I've recently gotten an Elitebook 845 G10 which runs on a Ryzen 7 Pro 7840HS, and battery life was at first shit. The issue was with the BIOS being bugged and not allowing ASPM. After manually activating, I now get around 12-15 hours on a 50Wh battery, depending on use of course. Results still preliminary though, more testing needs to be done.
Btw, I chose the Elitebook because it actually features great repairability. Pretty much everything can be swapped out, including memory. I was reluctant to buy HP, mostly due to the reputation they earned with their printer business shenanigans, but so far don't regret the purchase at all. In fact I like this device more and more.
Pretty much everything worked out of the box with ArchLinux, except for ASPM, which I was able to fix within a couple hours.
edit: Oh and the main motivation behind preferring the Elitebook over the Framework was the price. I mean really? Upgrade to 7840 almost 400 Euro? Lenovo charges like 80 Euro for that. For 1200 Euro I got the aforementioned CPU with a beautiful 120hz, 500nits, 2560x1600 screen, 2x16GB 5600 DDR5 SO-DIMM, 1TB NVME, etc. But it was a student offer.