Just thought I should post the results, maybe someone would find this useful while they consider buying a laptop with this processor.
Anyways, It performs great for being a mobile chip. Comes within 99% of the performance of a Ryzen 7 5800X which is a desktop processor.
Just writing this sort-of-a tutorial for anyone that has recently bought a laptop and desires to squeeze as much battery time as possible.
Before proceeding, just note that the methods mentioned are considered as advanced. So if you don't know much about computers or don't trust 3rd party open source software, do not proceed past the intermediate level.
Objective;-
The main focus is to squeeze as much battery life as possible for light tasks such as note taking, browsing, video playback, light programming, taking your laptop to collage/school classes etc.
Details:-
My laptop is an HP OMEN MAX with a Ryzen AI 7 350 and an RTX 5070Ti. But that doesn't matter because we'll be disabling the dedicated GPU anyway, so you can still follow this tutorial if you have a mid tier business laptop with a similar processor. Keep in mind that my laptop has an 83Whr battery and all estimates revolve around this number, so you might get different results.
Step 1: Basic optimizations
Firstly, you have to change your usage habits. Only keep apps open that you need at the moment, background tasks drain your battery faster than you realize.
Then, press Win + I to open settings, go to System>Power & Battery, click on "Energy saver" and turn it on.
If your laptop has a keyboard backlight or an RGB lightbar, turn all of those off from whatever proprietary software that your manufacturer puts in your laptop.
Step 2: Intermediate optimizations
Putting windows into energy saver isn't enough. You have to launch the software that controls power modes on your laptop, each manufacturer has their own version, which for my case is the Omen Gaming Hub.
Navigate to the selection menu that lets you decide between power modes like eco, balanced and high performance. Change your power mode to eco, sometimes there's a checkbox for "change automatically when running on battery power" so turn that on.
Optional: If your laptop is a gaming laptop, that same application will have a section called "Graphics Switcher" or "MUX Switch", enter that and change your GPU mode to Integrated Graphics only. This will physically cut the connection to your dedicated GPU. May require you to restart your laptop.
Then, go into windows settings again, go to system>display>advanced display and change your refresh rate to 60hz or whatever the lowest supported setting is. You don't need the full 120hz or 165hz for light tasks.
Step 3: Advanced optimizations
Now you've gotten to the point where the rest of the tweaks return diminishing results but still worth doing if all you want is just a bit more battery life.
First, you have to download and use a tool called Process Lasso. It lets you do manual processor scheduling and affinity management, which is what we'll be doing. It is highly trusted by the community for being reliable and not affecting video game anti-cheats. And no it is not a virus.
Launch Process Lasso and give it admin permissions. The UI might scare you at first but don't worry, it is very simple to use. At the top you will see graphs monitoring your CPU, GPU and memory usage, right below that in the tab labeled "All processes" which list all the background processes running on your computer, kind of like how task manager works.
Here, you might require to have a processor that has separate performance cores and efficiency cores, almost all intel processors today have these, as well as most AMD processors (like mine). Some "HX" series processors might not have separate efficiency cores but it is still beneficial to separate different tasks to different cores.
Scroll down this list to find applications like chrome.exe, discord.exe or whatever that you usually have opened in the background, pick one process and right click on it, go to CPU Affinity>Always>Select CPU Affinity. This opens a small window that lists all of your CPU threads (not just cores). You'll notice that some threads end with an "E" which stands for efficiency core, for example "CPU 11E". What you have to do now is to click the button below that says "E-core" to automatically select all the efficiency cores and then click OK to back out.
What you just did now was to assign a background task to only use the efficiency core, these use less power as compared to the performance cores to do the same tasks. Applications like chrome or whatever you likely applied these settings to are comparatively lightweight and almost never require full power from the performance cores.
Even if you have an HX series processor and there are no efficiency cores, it is still beneficial to separate the background tasks and your main, heavy tasks using this method. You can permanently assign different cores to them so that they never collide and cause stutters or lag.
Then, we will be using an open source too called Universal X86 Tuning Utility. It basically lets you make your own power presets and lets you program it so that a preset is automatically applied under certain conditions, for example, automatically applying a custom "battery saver" preset when system detects the laptop is not connected to the charger.
To make our preset, you have to start on the home page, go to Custom Presets>APU/CPU Power Tuning (Intel and AMD name it differently).
You will now see 5 sliders, they will be named differently depending on your processor but basically there will be a "Slow Power Limit" and a "Fast Power Limit". The slow power limit is what your laptop will be using most of the time, the fast power limit is what your processor might spike up to for a few seconds when something requires more power.
Change the slow power limit to something like 15-20W (whatever that doesn't actually hinder your work load) and change the fast power limit to 25-30W. Change the Fast Boost Duration to something like 10-15 seconds, this limits how long the processor can stay at the fast power limit. (Usually the spikes don't last longer than 5 seconds).
After this, type a preset name on the top right, click the save icon on the bottom right, then go to the "Auto" section on your left. Spot the "Preset on battery discharge" setting, and assign it to the preset that you just created and that's it. That preset will be automatically applied when you are running off of battery.
Result:-
Monitoring my remaining battery time using HWInfo, just idling on the windows desktop gives around 595 minutes (almost 10 hours).
Using my laptop according to the purpose configured optimizations, I get 300 minutes (5 hours) while using a 1-2 tabs of google, discord running in the background, and one Linux virtual machine running on VMware.
So it's been 7 days since I've gotten this laptop (model ak0074AX) and just thought that I should write a review especially cause this model didn't have any reviews on the internet when I was looking for one before buying.
Specifications:-
AMD Ryzen AI 7 350
Nvidia RTX 5070Ti
16GB 5600Mhz CL46
1TB Gen 4 Samsung NVMe
1920x1200 165hz anti glare display 400nits
What was my first impression?
It was heavy, not too much, just enough to make you think that it is a proper gaming laptop.
All exterior body panels that you get to see and touch are made of metal, it has a very subtle shine and it's not as dark black as you'd expect. It does the RGB keyboard light up thing when you turn it on and the keyboard felt great as well.
Setup:-
First thing I did was to use CTT and debloat windows, removed copilot, onedrive, activity history, telemetry etc.
Updated all the drivers (forgot a key one which resulted in a catastrophic driver conflict, more info at the bottom).
Then i downloaded HWINFO, a few games and ran a stress test to make sure that there weren't any factory defects.
Performance & Temperatures:-
Keep in mind I'm using a cooling pad with a 140mm fan that goes upto 2200rpm, not that the laptop needs it to stay cool, ergonomics are the primary reason.
Firstly I played Minecraft with mods and shaders, because it took the least time to download. Mods included were Terralith, Tectonic, Distant Horizons, Iris, Complementary Unbound (shaders) and all required mods alongside them.
It hovers between 85-120FPS with shaders at max and DH set to 128. The CPU did most of the heavy lifting and stayed stable at 85C and the GPU stayed at 70C.
Then came Forza Horizon 6. It defaulted to high settings and stayed at 140+ fps without DLSS, so I turned it everything up to ultra, raytracing on and DLSS 3x and it was just enough to max out the 165hz display.
The CPU and GPU both stayed at 68-72C for the entire time, no gradual increase in temperature as reported by some reviewers on similar hardware.
Then Subnautica 2 early access. It defaulted to medium settings and ran at 90fps. Turned it up to high and fps dropped to 55. Though I'm sure the final, optimized release will boost fps overall because the early access build is not even pushing the hardware to maximum power, CPU stays at 68C and GPU at 55C.
At last, the final game I played in the first 7 days was War Thunder. It defaulted to very high settings and ran at 70fps without frame generation. CPU and GPU sitting at 70C.
Build Quality:-
It isn't the most robust laptop in the world, but definitely not fragile either. The lid has quite a bit of flex when pressed even though it's metal, keyboard and surrounding deck flex substantially less. The bottom plate has little to no flex.
Display only wobbles when you intentionally push it, even then it stabilizes quickly, it never wobbles when typing unless you're spamming buttons while playing a game.
Is the build quality a little underwhelming?
Yes.
Is it forgivable?
Also yes, it's cheaper than the competition (at least in the Indian market). Some competitors are selling 5060 configurations for a higher price than what I paid for this 5070Ti laptop, and the the same trend can be observed with configurations up to 5090. Also worth noting, HP used magnesium-aluminum alloy instead of pure aluminum in order to keep the weight under control.
Did I face driver issues?
Yes, but it was my own fault, I updated Nvidia drivers and forgot to update the AMD drivers, eventually the screen just froze, I did a force shut down and restarted, laptop ran for 30 seconds and then froze again. At that point I realized that I had forgotten to install the AMD driver, and the "Hybrid" graphics mode was trying to assign separate jobs to the iGPU and dGPU. Which caused the AMD iGPU to choke because the drivers caused some kind of conflict. So I had to boot into the Omen bios and change the graphics mode to discrete, boot into windows, install AMD drivers properly and then switch back to hybrid.
Most importantly, Do I recommend this laptop?
Absolutely, it's 100% worth the price that it's sold at and it's significantly cheaper than the completion. As mentioned above, other companies are selling 5060 configurations at a higher price. I didn't face any factory defects or unreliability despite intentionally pushing both chips to max power for hours with stress tests. The CPU and GPU never went over 89C and 87C respectively, but these were to forced, artificial workloads, in actual gaming both chips run much cooler.
This was just delivered today. It's an HP OMEN MAX specifically the Ryzen AI 7 350 & RTX 5070 Ti.
This is my first ever gaming laptop, I'm moving over from an 8 year old Dell inspiron which has an i3 and Radeon 2gb graphics card, which is miserable as you could've guessed.
I have done the usual day 1 debloating, yet to play any games as they're taking time to download, but I will be pushing it to the max.
I'm still learning how to actually use a gaming laptop, so if anyone has suggestions that they think might help me, feel free to suggest.
This guy has been repeatedly attacking Arunachal Pradesh, I've been fighting for over a day now and need some backup.