Legion Go - Battery vs Performance

Bazzite
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This is in no way an issue at all with Bazzite, and is more of a hardware thing and these manufacturers not really making the best decisions on the hardware choices.

Some may disagree, but I have been testing the Steam Deck and the Legion Go for a while now, Windows and Linux, both have similar issues with battery life, not so much on the Steam Deck, but definitely on the Legion Go.

Using the Legion Go to do anything or playing any game at all, you will see the battery drop fast, you can lose 3 to 7% just on a cold boot.

I also notice that in most games I see 60 to 90% utilization on the GPU and usually 5 to 7% on the CPU.

The Legion Go with the Z1 Extreme has 8 cores with SMT (AMD’s version of hyperthreading) giving you 16 threads.

The reason I like Bazzite OS, is the ability to quickly change the TDP settings, and you can see the effects it has on this utilisation of CPU/GPU using the steam performance overlay.

At 15watt I see is 16 threads and the cores sitting at 500 to 800mhz, if I drop the TDP to 8watt, it seems to lock them down to 500mhz and the Steam interface is laggy and very unresponsive and even a light weight simple game will struggle to hit 60fps.

So even at 15watt, the CPU’s are stuck below 800mhz, chewing power like there is no tomorrow and light games are fine, but AAA titles suffer, and the battery is just draining.

So I decided to disable 4 cores in the bios and run through everything again, now at 15watt I see the cores climbing to 2ghz and games seem to run and launch a little faster, battery consumption has gotten better, and frame rates are more stable.

So I went back into the bios and disabled SMT, then I went through all of my tests again, and now I find, at 8watt TDP the cores are hitting over 2.5ghz all the time, games launch faster, there is no lag in Steam and frame rates are better than ever and battery life is excellent.

So my take on this is, 4 cores boosting up to high clock speeds is better for gaming and better for battery, and 8 cores hyper threading at 500mhz is pretty useless for gaming and are just chewing up power for very little return.

I’m sure when talking about emulation this is probably a different story, but the primary use of these handheld consoles is PC Gaming.

I feel the engineers should have opted for less CPU cores and an increase in GPU cores, I feel this would have made more sense.

So the TLDR is, disable 4 cores and SMT switch to 8watt TDP and enjoy solid gaming with extended battery life on the Legion Go while running Bazzite OS…

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Did you use SimpleDeckyTDP to control the TDP? I am playing Yakuza 4 remastered on Bazzite OS latest, and I use SimpleDeckyTDP to set it to 10W, background polling, disabled 4 cores and SMT in bios, disabled CPU boot and SMT in SimpleDeckyTDP, and enabled Lenovo Custom TDP Mode, but 4 core speed were stuck at 544Mhz, if I didn’t set GPU speed, it would stuck at 800Mhz.

The only change I make would change that is to raise the TDP to 15W, then both GPU and CPU become dynamic based on the needs but I want to game at 10W or less cuz I could do that on Windows and I was even playing newer and more demanding game like Judgement and Lost Judgement, I could play at 8W locked at 36FPS for max battery life and graphics balance. I am sure Bazzite can do this, I am not sure what did I miss, would you describe what other plugins and settings you have?

note: I also ran sudo ryzenadj -i and everything printed fine.

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Hi Bud,

I use Handheld Daemon to adjust TDP, I have also switched up to 6 cores but left hyperthreading off, effectively the same as the Steam Deck, and 10w seems like a good sweet spot for me, the cores all climb to high speeds still, and cpu/gpu seems to have a balanced usage, at 4 cores 8w the cpu utilisation was climbing much higher vs the gpu and Steam could get a little laggy to navigate, I play games a 60fps, if the game is dropping below that, then I crank the TDP up, if the game is still too demanding, then I usually switch to streaming the game from desktop PC instead :slight_smile:

I personally cant handle the eye strain on anything under 60hz, prefer 90 or 120 to be honest, at 60fps for older games, at 10w TDP you will get pretty good battery life, but at 15w or higher, you can watch the battery drop pretty fast.

Something else to look at, if you see higher GPU utilization vs CPU, then allow more power to the GPU and push its clock up, and disable CPU boost feature, then it will be more balanced.

I know some will disagree, but I get annoyed with battery capacity of these devices, I want more battery capacity and not more flashy features, just pack 99wh in them, or allow us to fit larger batteries, this used to be a thing, with Laptops, PDA’s, even phones, when I’m sitting down for a long game session on the Legion Go, I just connect an external Power bank that has 100w charging, this is my weapon of choice:

I have a stack of Dewalt tool batteries, so I can just swap them out as I need, and I use these magnetic USB-C connectors on both, the powerbank and the LeGo:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004648230080.html

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Thank you for your quick reply. I am just wondering what did I do wrong. I tried 8W, 10W, 12W. 13W,
14W, and 15W, only at 15W the decky plugin wasn’t sluggish, and cpu and GPU both ran fine. I could play my games at 36FPS to match 144Hz screen no problem. But yakuza 4 couldn’t even stay at stable 36FPS with 13W TDP. I tried 4 cores, 6 cores, 8 cores, disabled and enabled smt and cpu boost, none worked smoothly until I put it at 15W.

I wonder if I should try something else like HHD instead of SimpleDeckyTDP.

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I prefer HHD as I have had issues with the DeckyLoader plugins, not sure if the one your using is an issue, but the tools I tried in the past didn’t work properly as they were primarily designed for the Steam Deck.

I definitely see my CPU cores pushing above 2ghz, they will hit over 4ghz in short bursts if I leave the boost feature enabled, the only time I see them stuck at low levels is when they are all enabled.

Have you messed with any other BIOS settings? have you enabled or disabled STAPM?

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I forgot that I was using HHD the first time I put Bazzite on my Legion Go 8 months ago. Since HHD comes with Bazzite now, I just uninstalled SimpleDeckyTDP and LegionGoMapper, now using just HHD to adjust TDP and Fan Curve and see if it works. I will post back shortly. Thank you.

I am using STAPM already.

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I played the game on windows and steam deck, both performed better.

I tried HHD TDP, the CPU speed seems to be unlocked more at 12W but as long as it’s 10W, it’s the same and for some reasons, the GPU speed is still locked at 800Mhz. I tried to manually set the GPU clock to 1800Mhz but it’s so weird that there is no improvements over FPS, still at 29FPS. I also tried to lower the game resolution all the way down to 1280x800 and use Integer scaling, same result.

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I don’t have this game myself so I cant test it, but do you have LADV enabled in HHD?

Something may have changed recently, Ill have a play later and see if I’m seeing anything weird, when in desktop mode, run some benchmarks and run some hardware monitor widgets so you can see what is happening with CPU/GPU with various HHD settings, this is how I set mine up initially.

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Thanks, let me try that. It’s weird that I didn’t have to tune anything back then so I am expecting newer version to be more autonomous but I guess there are too many features and fixes introduced since then.

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You don’t really have to tune anything, you can as you have found just switch to 15w and everything is rosy, I just found 4 or 6 cores boosting to higher clocks is better for games versus 16 threads running at 500mhz or lower.

Switch to 15w for a demanding game and switch to 10 or 8w for not so demanding, but cutting the cores and hyperthreads should give you better boost on the CPU per core and give you more headroom for the GPU.

These mobile APU’s should never have been made with 8 hyperthreading cores, I would have preferred them to be 6 with no HT max, and 2 or 1 of them designed to boost high only, and pack more GPU cores in, the Steam Deck APU is pretty good to be honest, the Legion Go is overkill in the wrong areas, its APU would make more sense for a Laptop as it would excel at more work intensive tasks vs gaming, but at least we can shut the cores and HT off still.

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I know but my problem is not about switching between W, it’s that I switched to 15 or even 20W, there is no change in GPU and CPU frequency, and game FPS stayed the same regardless of what TDP + GPU + game resolution I change them to, that’s the weird part. I finished Judgement and Lost Judgement by playing 1200P low + FSR 2.1 at 10W on Legion Go Bazzite using HHD back in around March 2024. It worked fine, even the fan curve. But this latest 41 didn’t do that, it’s odd. I just deleted the partitions, and now trying to reinstall Bazzite again and see if it works.

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Okay I just noticed some weird behaviour last night, indeed anything under 15w and the GPU just locks at 800mhz, and while you have the game unfocussed the CPU is locked at just above 500mhz, then when you return to the game it will boost up to 1200+ mhz but GPU still locked at 800mhz, and that’s with power skewed to GPU or not, and with CPU boost enabled or disabled, so something is a miss, only on 15w will the GPU start boosting, I feel like all the additional settings in HHD make zero difference and are being ignored.

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Not sure how often you set it to below 15W, I saw your post saying that you love 10W, that’s why I replied you, cuz most of the people I know from online forums and discord do not use optimize battery life and graphics balance, instead they just keep pushing the 30W envelope.

I feel like this type of device has a lot of potential unlocked if the driver and software are doing it correctly. But software and drivers have grown too big too complex that it’s not easy to have an overview of everything, so I get that. Just hopefully they will fix this.

I reported this on the Legion Go Bazzite discord channel and Antheas replied “Yeah I think we tune the CPU clocks aggressively”. I am going to follow up on that and will ask them to check that, I am more than happy to test that and see if it helps.