energy impact over 110% Mbp running Arena5

[YayFuzzy]

I have been having an issue with power drain while plugged in to house power. I am sending signal to two projectors over a matrox tripple head2go and using a 20" cinema display as a secondary desk top. I have been shutting off the retina display to keep the mbp running cooler and it seems to help the FPS on my playback. since upgrading to Arena5 I have had a slow decline in my battery power that forces the laptop to shut off when exhausted.
I checked in the Activity monitor under Energy Impact that Arena5 was reporting over 100% use when this was occurring (110-130%).
I was also capturing a second laptop via BlackMagic Intensity Extreem.

i am not trying to run on battery but what are my options if the adapter cannot provide enough power to run Arena5 for extended periods of time. This is an odd situation to say the least.

mid 2014 mbp
Arena5
thank you
Derek

[Zoltán]

Check your power supply at the bottom, is it the 85 Watt version?

I use a turbo boost switcher to lower cpu and gpu frequency for less heat generation - reducing power consumption, you could try it maybe it helps.

I tried now to run arena, saying around 110 in the activity monitor, and google chrome video site over 140(sometimes 320) and my power supply still managed to charge my battery from 98%to 100% in about 15 minutes with turbo boost enabled. (2012 MBP).
so that number you see there might not be %.

also you could try another power adapter if you can to compare, maybe yours is beginning to fail.

[Oaktown]

It could also be that your battery is bad so check out the condition of your battery in System Information>Hardware>Power. Here is what mine looks like:

Screen Shot 2016-01-04 at 09.49.02.png (82.77 KiB) Viewed 5989 times

Another thing you can do is to power all your USB devices that draw power from your computer (Matrox, DL adapter, etc..) from external 5V USB adapters

[francoe]

Turbo Boost switcher can't work in that case if I undestand it right. Turbo on mac is on for low profile taks, when you have a big load, turbo is shutted off automatically (btw, I have it allways turned off by any chance).

Have the same kind of issue on mbp 2015 with arena 5. Try'ed limiting the cpu use of the app, help a little bit, but limit your work a lot under 95%. So I'm stick to 4 on osx. Bootcamped win works much better for me, since you can set up an energy plan.

[DayVeeJay]

You can also kill or lower the LCD and keyboard backlighting to save power. I do this when my battery starts to get low and it does make a difference. I'd check to make sure you're running an 85w power supply