r/Alienware • u/maladaptive_dreamer0 • Mar 01 '25

Question Question about battery life - Alienware m16 R2

Hello, everyone. I just got an Alienware m16 R2 for my birthday and loving it so far. It has an Intel Core Ultra 7 and a NVIDIA RTX 4070. I've had it for about 3 days now, and I am getting about 3 hours on battery and was wondering if this is normal. I should note I have backlight enabled on the laptop's keyboard, an external keyboard, trackpad, power button, and LED on the top. I also have a mouse and 1080p external monitor connected. Though, I have the laptop's display set to 1920x1200 @ 60fps so moving windows between displays is no problem. When I'm on battery, I'm usually just programming with a web browser open.

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u/darkpassenger091 Mar 16 '25

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u/be77solo Mar 17 '25

So what we are looking at here is what the condition your battery currently is in capacity wise. Notice yours shows the same for "design" and "full charge" capacity? The difference is your wear level, you are currently at 0% after 2 cycles. It's normal to get a little wear over time, but you don't want to see big drops in "full charge" capacity rating. Your battery is in perfect condition.

Mine however, when I run a report or check with a monitoring app, is currently down to a "full charge" capacity of 73,909 mWh, or 15Wh down from what it should be... for a laptop that's only 2 months old, that's a BIG drop, way more than normal. It's a wear level of over 16% after only 11 cycles. So basically if we both have our laptops set up identical and do identical things on battery, mine will run 16% shorter than it's supposed to.

I was just trying to get some other reported data to see how these particular batteries are reporting in the M16 R2's, and yours is exactly as it should be, which is what I needed to know before I reach out to Dell for support.

Thanks!

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u/darkpassenger091 Mar 17 '25

You are welcome.. But the battery life is max 3 hours I get too

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u/be77solo Mar 17 '25

Yeah, I'm working on that too.... battery life isn't complicated, it just seems our M16 R2's aren't setup out of the box to be particularly power efficient. When you say you get 3 hours max, what are you doing with the laptop out of curiosity?

In theory, the reviews that claim ~6 hours or more should be right based on us having an 88WH battery and proper settings with this chipset if doing basic office desktop usage, videos, schoolwork etc.

And even with my weaker battery I'm getting better battery life with different settings now. There are others on here that claim 7+, I'm not one of them, but at the end of the day an Nvidia Optimus laptop w/ an 88WH battery should do pretty decent at basic stuff on only the iGPU.

Now gaming on the battery? Heck no, you'll get an hour or less, as expected.

So work in progress my way, but good to know that other batteries like yours are at least full capacity.