Laptop Performance Drops With New Battery?

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drapacioli

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Laptop: ASUS N53SV, i7 2670QM, GT540M, 6GM RAM, SSD installed.

So I recently upgraded my battery from a 6 cell to a 9 cell, but I've got a problem now. Before, I could play a game or do something CPU intensive and it would run perfectly fine (draining the battery quickly, obviously, to the point I could run it down to 10% in an hour), allowing me an hour or so of gaming on the battery if I wanted to. With the new battery in under the same setting though, all I get is stutters and lag when I try to do anything intensive. I decided to download Prime95 to stress-test for maxmimum power consumption while on the battery and confirm what I was seeing in games and prove it wasn't some driver update that killed performance or something, and here's the results:

Old Battery (6-cell):

HWMonitor readings during test:
14839758785_68768901ca_b.jpg


Task Manager showing CPU load history during test:
14653111419_809544611a_b.jpg


New Battery (9-cell):

HWMonitor readings during test:
14839758815_2519daf471_b.jpg


Task Manager:
14836669551_0a89bfcb22_b.jpg


At first I thought I just had accidentally hit the power management button that enables power saving mode, but I hadn't, and running these tests multiple times gives the same results for each battery. So is the battery defective, or is there some software driver that needs updating for the new one, or am I just getting really unlucky with the throttling when I decide to run these? I mean, looking at the battery's voltage readings, the newer one is actually slightly higher, so I don't see why it would be struggling to provide enough power from these readings alone.
 

drapacioli

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It is. I even tried adjusting the performance settings to set the minimum processor state to 100%. Nothing changed. If I put it on power saver, the processor NEVER goes above .79GHz.
 

drapacioli

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It's not an overclocking problem, trust me. The laptop manages it on its own. If I force it and there's a different problem, I'll just kill the laptop. That's assuming it would work, which it doesn't, the hardware OC settings are locked down on this laptop, I have no ability to change anything even if I wanted to.

Also, it's not just the CPU, the GPU throttles back as well if stressed on this new battery. Are there any other ideas that don't involve OC-related issues? I've already established that the laptop works perfectly fine on the old battery and while plugged in.
 

drapacioli

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Actually I'd rather not. Nothing personal but I don't go giving out my skype info. I'd be happy to work out the problem in this thread though.

I've got a replacement battery headed my way just in case, the seller of the battery has never heard of such an issue before themselves, but says they will fully test a replacement before sending it out just in case. If it arrives and has the same problem, there may be a hardware/software issue with the laptop instead. In the meantime though, I've noticed the voltage ratings for the new battery are rather high. It reports a 12.1v reading when off the charger and idling at about 90% capacity. Is that normal? The battery itself is rated at 10.8-11.1v (my laptop in particular is one of those 10.8v models). The old battery in comparison I'm not sure about because it's currently at a 50% charge, but I will charge it up and update this post. Regardless, I'm going under the admittedly optimistic hope that the higher reading isn't damaging to the laptop, as the charger for it runs at 19v out. Someone please do tell me if I'm wrong there.

EDIT: ok, so I did another test, I found that the new battery has troubles whenever the CPU tries to step up the voltage above 1v. Everything starts to hang, and the CPU dips back down to it's idle voltage before things start running smoothly again. It is this constant cycle of voltage stepping that appears to be causing the problem. Clearly the laptop has no problem with voltages while plugged in as it can run CPU and GPU at max, but when running the new battery, it cannot max either as measured with Prime95 and FurMark. Interestingly, the old battery runs FurMark OR Prime95 fine, but the combination will cause the same thing to happen. So it appears that both batteries will have the same experience, but the newer one exhibits problems sooner than the old one. Perhaps another strike on the battery for being potentially defective? Either that or the higher voltage reading is tricking the laptop into thinking it's above a certain threshold value where it can safely step up the CPU, but it really can't so it tries to draw too much power, in which case it's a software problem and all higher-rated batteries will show the same behavior...
 

drapacioli

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I know this is a huge delay, but I finally got a battery that worked. After dealing with one reseller (BatteryFox) and convincing them there was a problem with the battery and not my laptop, I was able to try two batteries before I finally just gave up and bought from a different seller (Dream-technologies on ebay). I got the first new 9-cell battery from that new seller in today and it works perfectly, just like the old 6-cell one. So, obviously the other reseller is not selling quality batteries. Thanks sgtmaster for trying to help and giving some ideas.
 
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