Battery performance on 10210U CPU when on balanced power management

[Henno]

Dear reader,

We just started testing a laptop with 10th gen Intel CPU (10210U) and found that this particular laptop did not deliver the Passmark score we expected but a much lower value.
We tested this while running the Passmark on Windows 10 1909 using Passmark V9 9.0.1011.
We expected to results in the region around 8565 give or take but we got 6600, see: https://www.passmark.com/baselines/V...d=136961655435
It turned out that we had to change the Windows power managend from "Balanced" to "Performance". We have never ever have to do this before....
Has someone seen this before and knows what the cause behind this is?

Regards, Henno

[Tim (PassMark)]

This is a common cause of CPU benchmarks being lower than expected, the power policies on laptops in particular tend to be more biased towards saving battery than delivering full performance of the CPU. If the power policy is not set to a performance option then it might take some time for the CPU to ramp up to full speed (or it may even be limited to <100% of the max speed) while the benchmark is running.

[Henno]

Hi Tim,

But why, oh why is this the first time we encountered this after some years of testing on +30 different models from 4 different brands (HP, Dell, Lenovo and Microsoft) ??
In this case, the first time, it is a Lenovo laptop with the 10210U CPU, On systems with 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th gen Intel cpu's with balanced power management setting this never occurred.

[David (PassMark)]

Whoever designed it obviously favored long battery life over performance. Or it was just an error on their part and they shipped the wrong default settings. It is really a question for Lenovo.

[Henno]

We checked out the BIOS settings: on AC power it should do high performance. We will bring this under their attention.

[Tim (PassMark)]

Also check the windows power plan settings, particularly the max processor state.

[Henno]

Above is what we have too.
We found out that Lenovo has implemented the power management different to , for example, HP. Lenovo needs to have the "powerslide" set to "Best performance".
Customize the Windows performance power slider | Microsoft Docs

[David (PassMark)]

It is pretty dumb to have 3 different ways to set the same thing and have them all work slightly differently (BIOS, Power management & slider).