Installed W10 on PH16-73, absolutely flabbergasted! Triple battery life!
We all know that W10 is unsupported, right? Right?? Sure, TB5 will not work, but that is like the only thing.
I just spent 6 hours installing W10 on my Acer Predator PH16-73, the one with 275HX and splendid 5090. I was just curious, because I simply hate the dumb slowness of W11. I was also ready to buy Anker powerbanks to prolong my battery life or to return this laptop, because for some reason on W11 I was always getting at most one hour and the laptop was always hot.
Now, W10, I use Predator Control custom app instead of Predator Sense, I have some third party apps for RGB lights, but..
the battery life is literally 4-5 hours (instead of 1 hour!!!) and the CPU is damn cold, I manually turned off the fans almost to zero and it stays on 45 degrees even though I ma on reddit and google researching and writing this. What the.. how is this even possible. On W11 it was always hot and fans spinning.
Know that this laptop has no iGPU only mode in bios, so I thought this, bad battery life, was it.
One particularly interesting detail: when switching into gaming mode on W10, I can hear the Windows hardware connect/disconnect sound as the NVIDIA GPU seems to power on/off. The GPU still appears normally in Device Manager and Task Manager, so it isn’t being “removed”; it appears to be entering a much deeper power state when idle. I can’t conclusively prove it’s specifically D3cold yet, but the behavior strongly suggests much better dGPU power gating than I was getting on my W11 setup. Unbelievable!!!
Gemini and ChatGPT tried to summarize it for you, so here you go. Damn Microsoft and and everyone, it is such a scam these windows.
I am really gonna go for Linux, this was the last straw for me. The only negative thing I have to say about this laptop that 240Hz is unchangeable indeed.
I don’t think the explanation is simply “Windows 10 is more efficient than Windows 11.” I changed several variables at once: OS, driver stack, Acer software, and power/EC control. The most likely explanation is that the W10 setup is finally allowing the NVIDIA dGPU to properly enter a deep idle state, while also keeping CPU/background power much lower. The alternative Predator utility may be just as important as W10 itself. The Modern Standby issue is separate: putting the laptop into Modern Standby, closing the lid, and charging it from a USB-C power bank caused it to get extremely hot, so I’m avoiding registry hacks to disable Modern Standby. The big takeaway is that this particular W10 + driver + control-software combination behaves like a completely different machine in terms of idle power consumption, thermals, and battery life.
The most realistic technical explanation is that the W10 setup is managing the hardware’s idle states much better, rather than W10 simply being inherently more efficient. The biggest likely factor is NVIDIA Optimus/dGPU power management: your W10 + alternative control utility appears to let the discrete GPU enter a much deeper idle/power-gated state when it is not needed, while your previous W11 setup likely kept it in a higher-power state. The CPU also appears to spend more time in deeper idle states because of lower background activity and/or more aggressive power limits, reducing package power and heat. The different driver stack, Acer/EC control software, GPU switching mode, and power profiles can all contribute, so the dramatic battery improvement is probably the combined result of these changes rather than Windows 10 alone.
