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Comment by talhah | Hacker News Reader

Battery life is bad overall for this, at least on the sister T14s gen1. Is it the same experience for you and what tweaks have you made to increase battery life?

According to this thread we might never get AMD pstate driver working.

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Other-Linux-Discussions/amd-pst...

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I enabled the pstate driver yesterday for my T14s gen3 (AMD). It almost doubled my battery life, the fan never spins anymore and it's very very quiet and cool now. You need to specifically enable it in Linux kernel, this is how I did it:

https://github.com/pimeys/nixos/commit/17e8a9e2ce4b0f34ef6cf...

It should also be used together with the `shedutil` governor for the best results.

CPPC needs to be enabled in BIOS for this and unfortunately that option isn't present.

If you see the thread linked in previous comment, Lenovo has been advised not to enable the feature :/

Seems to work for me at least:

  > cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_driver
  amd-pstate

And, it has a tremendous effect on battery life and the fan speed on the G3. Maybe it doesn't work with previous models?

As the parent said, apparently AMD recommended not to enable it for that generation [1]. That's the price to pay for having a first gen I suppose...

[1] https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Other-Linux-Discussions/amd-pst...

Yes battery life is awful since day 1. I initially thought I had a faulty device or something. Apart from that the machine is great, it's really a shame. I tried a lot of various things mentioned in the forum, updated the BIOS, tested plenty of various configurations, to no avail.

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