Inspiron 16 Plus 7630, 3.5 hours of battery life?

The analogy was mine and is entirely correct.  You've taken a high performance, twin-turbo V8 sportscar, disabled the turbos and half the cylinders, and now see the 20+ mpg you would get from the same car with a 4 cylinder engine.

The 3.5 hours you quoted was with the dedicated GPU enabled -- of course the battery runs will be better if you disable it.

Have you used this laptop before? I'm just curious as your advice appears to be purely theoretical.

As an owner of one these laptops, I'm trying to give other owners useful and first-hand information on how to get better battery life.

Anway, that aside, after doing further testing, the culprit appears to be a tab of YouTube being open in either Chrome or Edge. And yes, the dedicated GPU is enabled. 

The reduction in battery usage mentioned in my original post was co-incidental with a tab of YouTube NOT being open in Edge. Opening a YouTube tab (irrespective of whether a video was playing or not) increased the battery usage back to ~ 25% / hour. Closing the YouTube tab in Edge reduced the battery usage to ~ 10% / hour.

Ignore my initial suggestion of disabling the dedicated GPU as this appears to do nothing.

Since that youtube tab taps the nVidia GPU, it is the cause of the battery drain.  Look at the power required by the GPU vs. the CPU -- it draws up to 115 W when running at full throttle.  The CPU itself draws between 45 and 115 W depending on load.  Add those two together and you have the very reason why, when both are running anywhere near full throttle, you see only a  couple to a few hours of battery runtime.  Cut the GPU out of the picture and you double the battery runtime.

Gaming notebooks are built for performance, not battery economy.  

@sonicmrsumo​

Try selecting the iGPU in Nvidia Control Panel to force it to be used in internet browsers.

There is no need to "wake up" the dGPU to play a video on YouTube and, if that happens, your battery will be drained much faster for sure.

Thanks all for the very helpful feedback :-)

I ran a test yesterday where I had 5 Edge tabs open (not YouTube though) and WhatsApp desktop open at about 30% brightness. dGPU enabled.

Interestingly, the battery discharge rate was about -25000mwh to start with, then after about 20 mins, this dropped massively to between -5500mwh to -10000mwh for the remainder of the test.

With this, I got a little over 11 hours out of the battery. Which is a great result and is inline with online reviews.

I'll do similar tests over the next few days and post the results.

Thanks again to everyone for responding :-)

An update.

The previous test must've been a total fluke. As now on battery, with the same things running as the previous test, the discharge rate is consistently -22000mwh, equating to around 3.5 hours of battery life.

Not really sure what is happening with this laptop. 

Do forum members have any other ideas?

For any laptop to have good battery life the dGPU must not be in use.

You can check if something in the background is using the Nvidia GPU through the Nvidia Control Panel.

Click the Desktop tab and then click "Display GPU activity icon in notification area".

Go to the Windows notification area (bottom right corner, on the arrow, near the clock).

Click on the new icon that will be there and then it will open the activity monitor.

If something is using the GPU, you must correct it by changing to using the iGPU in the specific application.

After the repair, you must restart the laptop so that the dGPU remains unused.

Thanks for the tip.

I've just done another test, and with the dGPU not being used, and Airplane mode on, the battery is still draining at -22000mwh. No idea why I had that amazing single test result a few days ago.

I think I'm at the point where I'll raise a support request. 

Thanks everyone for your help :-)

@sonicmrsumo​ 

Hi, I also just bought the same laptop reading/seeing the reviews online and was extremely disappointed to see only about 3 hours of battery life. Did you get any concrete resolution, or ways to improve this?

Would appreciate any info.

@yaniv_k​ I also have this issue, if you manage to solve this issue, please tell me how. Thank you for any information

I just got this laptop and have the same issue. 1hr left me with 65% battery. 

Same issue here. Three hours projected battery at full charge with all battery savings settings on.

I Have the same issue.. Is there a solution?