[Success] Lenovo ThinkPad L380 - OC - Monterey 12.3

[utof]

At 1st boot my battery life is awful, if I put it to sleep and wake it up a few minutes later it gets better but never what you would call great! My battery has lost some of its original capacity tho.

My battery has got quite the same wear level as yours at 3521mAh full capacity. It's interesting as we can compare our installations and battery consumption.
Edit: if battery life is better after sleep on your laptop, that would mean that something is flawed, either something that doesn't reactivate after sleep (device, sub-component, cpu state...?), or EC/battery reading is wrong before or after sleep.

I've finally fixed the instant wake trouble: SSDT-GPRW.aml did lack its "GPRW to XPRW" ACPI patch in config.plist (reference: https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Post-Install/usb/misc/instant-wake.html )

I've tested sleep during night (8 hours of sleep), and during 8h of sleep it drains 12% of battery. Tested twice over two nights. I thinks that's a lot.

So I've checked external USB ports during sleep with a USB-power-meter:

• USB-A ports are not powered
• both USB-C ports are still powered while sleeping...

 

[utof]

Maybe there might be some room for power consumption improvement on PCIe/NMVE side with ASPM. And perhaps it could be an explanation of different battery life before/after sleep, like the SSD is on a different level of power state after sleep... This just a guess.

On my SSD, from smartctl:

Supported Power States
St Op     Max   Active     Idle   RL RT WL WT  Ent_Lat  Ex_Lat
 0 +     5.50W       -        -    0  0  0  0        0       0
 1 +     3.50W       -        -    1  1  1  1        0       0
 2 +     3.00W       -        -    2  2  2  2        0       0
 3 -   0.0700W       -        -    3  3  3  3     4000   10000
 4 -   0.0025W       -        -    4  4  4  4     4000   40000

 

[molko1234]

Maybe there might be some room for power consumption improvement on PCIe/NMVE side with ASPM. And perhaps it could be an explanation of different battery life before/after sleep, like the SSD is on a different level of power state after sleep... This just a guess.

On my SSD, from smartctl:

Supported Power States
St Op     Max   Active     Idle   RL RT WL WT  Ent_Lat  Ex_Lat
 0 +     5.50W       -        -    0  0  0  0        0       0
 1 +     3.50W       -        -    1  1  1  1        0       0
 2 +     3.00W       -        -    2  2  2  2        0       0
 3 -   0.0700W       -        -    3  3  3  3     4000   10000
 4 -   0.0025W       -        -    4  4  4  4     4000   40000

Many thanks for your input utof! I never got round to doing any more testing unfortunately, a busy work schedule and two young children saw to that!

In the mean time I got a great deal on a Dell Vostro 5481 on eBay (£131/$161) similar specs (14"/i5-8265U/8GB/256GB) My intention was to sell the Dell for profit locally but the fact that it has two internal drive bays and a better screen swung it for me and I've sold the Lenovo instead - The keyboard, touchpad and even the battery of the Lenovo are much better tho, I will sure miss it!

 

[utof]

Many thanks for your input utof! I never got round to doing any more testing unfortunately, a busy work schedule and two young children saw to that!

In the mean time I got a great deal on a Dell Vostro 5481 on eBay (£131/$161) similar specs (14"/i5-8265U/8GB/256GB) My intention was to sell the Dell for profit locally but the fact that it has two internal drive bays and a better screen swung it for me and I've sold the Lenovo instead - The keyboard, touchpad and even the battery of the Lenovo are much better tho, I will sure miss it!

Hi molko1234,

Yeah two drive bay is good thing, it is something I really miss on the L380.

I did spot the L380 as a good hackintosh candidate with upgrable ram up to 32GB, because the possibility to get unlocked and fully featured BIOS in order to make it as much as possible the most compatible to MacOS. And also, I needed a Swiss layout keyboard, and those ones are easier to find for Thinkpads than for Dell.
From that experience regarding battery life, I would probably change the SSD from WD Black SN750 to WD Blue SN570. As even with PCIE power states tweaking in the BIOS, the WD Black consumes too much energy, especially in idle.
The LCDs on Thinkpads usually suck, that's a fact since Lenovo took over IBM Thinkpad series... The best one referenced for L380 has only 256K colors and less than 50% sRGB colorspace coverage. I've upgraded my L380 with a better one (not compatible on paper but that works) with 16M colors and 99% sRGB coverage.

 

[molko1234]

Hi molko1234,

Yeah two drive bay is good thing, it is something I really miss on the L380.

I did spot the L380 as a good hackintosh candidate with upgrable ram up to 32GB, because the possibility to get unlocked and fully featured BIOS in order to make it as much as possible the most compatible to MacOS. And also, I needed a Swiss layout keyboard, and those ones are easier to find for Thinkpads than for Dell.
From that experience regarding battery life, I would probably change the SSD from WD Black SN750 to WD Blue SN570. As even with PCIE power states tweaking in the BIOS, the WD Black consumes too much energy, especially in idle.
The LCDs on Thinkpads usually suck, that's a fact since Lenovo took over IBM Thinkpad series... The best one referenced for L380 has only 256K colors and less than 50% sRGB colorspace coverage. I've upgraded my L380 with a better one (not compatible on paper but that works) with 16M colors and 99% sRGB coverage.

That sounds like a nice upgrade!

I don't know if this helps at all - as already said, I find that battery performance from the Lenovo is poor until it has been put to sleep and woken back up, using over 20w before sleep then 5-8w in use after being woken up from sleep.

I tried on the Dell disabling the NVME drive and testing battery on the internal SATA drive, not a totally fair test, it was the same version of Monterey (12.3.1) but one installation has a lot more apps installed.

Very similar behavior on the SATA drive with NVME disabled, 20w+ in use before sleep and 5-8w in use after waking up.

 

[utof]

I've swapped the drive from a WD Black to a WD Blue (model SN570 1TB)

Power states (from smartctl):

Supported Power States
St Op     Max   Active     Idle   RL RT WL WT  Ent_Lat  Ex_Lat
 0 +     4.20W    3.70W       -    0  0  0  0        0       0
 1 +     2.70W    2.30W       -    0  0  0  0        0       0
 2 +     1.90W    1.80W       -    0  0  0  0        0       0
 3 -   0.0250W       -        -    3  3  3  3     3900   11000
 4 -   0.0050W       -        -    4  4  4  4     5000   44000

Power consumption is less than WD Black.

Disk speed:

Raw speeds are on par with the WD Black on that same machine (I did get 2500 MB/s write - 2800 MB/s read on that same machine with WD Black).

For general use on a laptop I would recommend the WD Blue SN570 over the WD Black.
Drawback: the WD Blue is Dramless (no ram module embedded for caching), it has an SLC cache of 12GB, so that means if you write files/folder on it that go over the cache limits then the write speed will fall down to 500MB/s (which is fair compare to previous WD Blue models for which write speed without cache were rather 100MB/s).
That means, if don't daily write/move big blocks of files bigger than 12GB, then the WD Blue is good for 99% of daily usage.

 

[SgtPeppers]

I have been running Monterey on m L380 and can confirm that battery life still kinda sucks. Otherwise, everything has been great, other than the trackpoint drift. I went around that by taking it apart and disconnecting it, as it has started getting on my nerves. I am using AirportITLWM and the Intel Bluetooth firmware as well.

 

[utof]

L380 with Monterey is pretty stable. I had better battery life result (4h - 4h30) by setting in BIOS ASPM managed by OS rather than by BIOS. And also with CPUFriend ( https://github.com/stevezhengshiqi/one-key-cpufriend ) set at 800Mhz minimal frequency and using "battery optimized" setting.
Regarding sleep (S3), the laptop still consumes way too much battery in that state, I think some PCIE ports are not suspended under sleep.
I haven't experienced trackpoint drift.
I managed to get hibernation working, but unfortunately there is a bug when waking from hibernation: the internal keyboard completley stops working after waking up from hibernation. The keyboard is totally disabled, even if you reboot and also at bios or OC level too. That bug affects several Lenovo models, and maybe other brands (Acer, Asus) under Monterey. Some people have experienced that on other Lenovo laptops after a reboot from Monterey. I suspect Monterey does something related to keyboard at Nvram level, because if I reset Nvram (thanks to an external USB keyboard), the internal keyboard become available anew.

 

[SgtPeppers]

L380 with Monterey is pretty stable. I had better battery life result (4h - 4h30) by setting in BIOS ASPM managed by OS rather than by BIOS. And also with CPUFriend ( https://github.com/stevezhengshiqi/one-key-cpufriend ) set at 800Mhz minimal frequency and using "battery optimized" setting.
Regarding sleep (S3), the laptop still consumes way too much battery in that state, I think some PCIE ports are not suspended under sleep.
I haven't experienced trackpoint drift.
I managed to get hibernation working, but unfortunately there is a bug when waking from hibernation: the internal keyboard completley stops working after waking up from hibernation. The keyboard is totally disabled, even if you reboot and also at bios or OC level too. That bug affects several Lenovo models, and maybe other brands (Acer, Asus) under Monterey. Some people have experienced that on other Lenovo laptops after a reboot from Monterey. I suspect Monterey does something related to keyboard at Nvram level, because if I reset Nvram (thanks to an external USB keyboard), the internal keyboard become available anew.

Hey, by chance do you happen to know how to disable the trackpoint, or should I go about it internally by disconnecting its ribbon cable?

 

[Feartech]

or should I go about it internally by disconnecting its ribbon cable?

sounds a bit extreme?