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How can I give my battery the best health and longest life possible?

General recommendations

  • Please avoid a so-called deep discharge. This occurs when you completely drain the battery and then don' use or charge the laptop for days or weeks. Practical example: if you forget to bring your charger and then completely drain the battery while working outside, it is recommended to immediately start charging the laptop when you return home in the evening before going to bed.
  • Please try to avoid permanent, intensive load on the battery. Saturating the dGPU is not recommended in battery mode if it can be avoided. You can find more information about this in the FAQ category "Portfolio" under the question"Which XMG laptop has the longest battery life?"
  • If you almost always only use your laptop stationary, please still charge and discharge your battery at least once a month. Discharging doesn't have to go all the way down to 0%, but an occasional below 20% (and subsequent recharge) would be good.
  • Avoid heat buildup on the battery. For example, don't place the laptop on a soft surface (e.g. blanket) while the battery is charging (or if you have to put it on a blanket, rather place it upside down). If you charge the laptop with a power bank, do not put it in a laptop bag or backpack while charging.
  • Note the following instructions for setting the maximum battery capacity.

Battery charging profiles

Most XMG models are capable of putting a user-defined limit on the maximum battery charge. On XMG CORE and NEO (from 2021), this is possible in the Control Center in the form of three profiles: Eco Mode, Balanced and High Capacity. If you only use your battery very rarely, set it to "Eco Mode". For moderate use, we recommend Balanced mode.

Note: these profiles work hidden in the background. Windows will indicate that the battery is charged to 100%, but in reality both charging speed and capacity will be reduced.

FlexiCharger

Other laptops (XMG CORE 14, FOCUS, APEX, PRO, ULTRA) offer the so-called FlexiCharger function in the BIOS setup. You can use it to manually set the lower and upper limit of the charging electronics:

  • Lower limit: how deep the battery has to be discharged before the laptop starts to charge the battery again.
  • Upper limit: up to where the laptop will charge the battery once it has started to do so.

FlexiCharger works transparently: when the upper limit is set, the user can see in Windows that charging will be interrupted once the desired percentage value is reached.

Note: when FlexiCharger is activated, it warns: "over time the meter's reading accuracy will deteriorate". This means that the battery percentage indicator may become less accurate over time. The deviation in accuracy can be up to 20% after 12 months. To recalibrate the accuracy of the battery level indicator, it is recommended to disable FlexiCharger and recharge the battery once to 100%.

Can I remove my battery if I only use the system stationary most of the time?

It depends on the laptop series used.

  • For systems with an external battery, the battery can be easily removed and the system can be used without the battery. These include the XMG APEX and XMG ULTRA series. In this case, the battery should ideally have a capacity of around 60% before being "stored" and should be used (discharged, recharged) once every 3 months.
  • In systems with batteries that are assembled inside the laptop, removal is possible but not recommended.

The latter is due to the fact that some of the high-performance series with internally assembled batteries (such as XMG CORE, FUSION and NEO) use the battery partly as a backup buffer for GPU power consumption spikes. While the original chargers that come with the laptop are sufficiently dimensioned to deliver enough power even under CPU and GPU full load, NVIDIA GPUs tend to sometimes draw significantly more than their nominal power in ultra-short microsecond timeframes. These peak loads can also be absorbed by the charger (our original AC adapters can easily absorb load peaks of up to 150% of their nominal power), but the battery still serves as an additional backup in these systems. This mechanism is primarily set up for those scenarios in which a user operates the laptop with a "smaller" power supply unit (i.e. one with less than the intended output power). If the battery is now removed from the system, the system automatically switches to a mode of reduced GPU power, as the battery is no longer available as a buffer. Since this mechanism is programmed at a very hardware-related level for safety reasons, it unfortunately cannot simply be optionally switched off.

Please use your battery on a regular basis

The use of the battery profiles described in this article does not relieve the user from the recommendation to use the battery once in a while. It is recommended to subject the battery to a charge cycle about 1x per month and to avoid both deep discharge and overstressing.