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LEOMODE

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 14, 2009
532
54
Southern California
I have a 15" 2013 Haswell MB Retina.

If I go into a Boot Camp mode, basically my machine becomesa PC laptop.

But what I am wondering is the 'Power Plan' for the MB Retina.

Because I haven't used genuine PC laptop for about 10 years, I am curious to see what would be the most energy/performance efficient for the Power Plan.

Since these default Power Plans may not be suitable for MB's, I kindly ask some Boot Camp pros for an answer.

There are 3 default plans:

Performance
Power Saver
Balance

you can tweak many more options if you go into the deeper options for each plan.

What I do is the followng:

Gaming
Surfing the web and trying to save the battery

Anyone with a recommended setting for a plan would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.
 

snaky69

macrumors 603
Mar 14, 2008
5,908
488
Performance when plugged in and gaming.

Battery saver the rest of the time.

I thought that was pretty self explanatory?:confused:

Alternatively, you can use "performance" all the time, but tweak the "on battery" settings to match those of "power saver". You'll get much lower performance when gaming on battery though (but who does that?)
 
Last edited by a moderator:

dusk007

macrumors 68040
Dec 5, 2009
3,411
104
Use Balance always except when you think it gets too noisy for what ever you are doing switch to power saving.
Performance is useless. It just disables some energy saving features that hurt performance not in the least. Balance ramps up power when need just as much. You got all the power it just tunes it down when there is no need for it. Performance just gives you more heat for nothing.
Power savings can reduce performance quite a bit depending on what the CPU prefs are. Mine are altered so I don't know the defaults. It can in some cases like flash videos yield a cooler notebook but in some cases where lots of single thread performance would be needed it may not get it.

Just forget about performance that is only for benchmark freaks and for some cheap crap notebook where certain power saving features are buggy. Balance on default give you the same performance. I have my power saving reduced to 70% cpu time. Which essentially makes the cpu sit at its lowest clock almost always and only go up to about 1.6Ghz. Helps it keep its cool in all situations. Is even enough in some games.

You can pretty much make any plan do anything.
 

makaveli559m

macrumors 6502
Apr 30, 2012
312
0
Use Balance always except when you think it gets too noisy for what ever you are doing switch to power saving.
Performance is useless. It just disables some energy saving features that hurt performance not in the least. Balance ramps up power when need just as much. You got all the power it just tunes it down when there is no need for it. Performance just gives you more heat for nothing.
Power savings can reduce performance quite a bit depending on what the CPU prefs are. Mine are altered so I don't know the defaults. It can in some cases like flash videos yield a cooler notebook but in some cases where lots of single thread performance would be needed it may not get it.

Just forget about performance that is only for benchmark freaks and for some cheap crap notebook where certain power saving features are buggy. Balance on default give you the same performance. I have my power saving reduced to 70% cpu time. Which essentially makes the cpu sit at its lowest clock almost always and only go up to about 1.6Ghz. Helps it keep its cool in all situations. Is even enough in some games.

You can pretty much make any plan do anything.

At 70% how is your MacBook temp?
 

LEOMODE

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 14, 2009
532
54
Southern California
Thanks a lot guys. I wasnt sure if I should customize the power settings but in fact there werent that many detailed settings to tweak regarding power and performance in the first place (besides cpu % amd such) thus I wanted to know how you guys go about this.

But I guess the default settings from windows is sufficient except for a cpu % tweak.

As a side note though its kind of sad that with boot camp mode you get nearly 2x loss of a battery time despite using only dedicated graphics. Doesnt mac osx will at least get 1.5 times more than boot camp even with dedicated turned on always?

Because with the same spec I thought pure windows will get more battery life. But correct me if I'm wrong.
Many of haswell windows laptop get at least 10hrs thats why (but then again maybe becauee they only run integrated graphics such as hd4400)
 
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