I'm not, wasn't sure if it would require any bios changes. Shouldn't we be able to get closer to the battery life in Windows without undervolting since Windows is using the graphics card and MacOS isn't? I think Windows seems to idle at a lower frequency.
Yes to the former but it still idles around 1.3 Ghz even though I set it to .8. Yeah, I'm gonna wait on undervolting until my warranty expires since I'm running off AC power mostly anyway. Prefer not to mess with those values for now since it's not entirely necessary and probably only giving another 10-20% I'm guessing?
Check my repo for the CPUFriendDataProvider kext if you're interested, got the 800 MHz working. Battery drain is still around 15 watts so I've come to the conclusion that it's the dGPU draining battery despite being in the D3 low power state. If anyone sees this and knowns of a solution I'd love to hear!
Ended up using the MacBookAir9,1 SMBIOS data to feed into CPUFriendFriend (manually edited the code slightly to look at the Mac-0CFF9C7C2B63DF8D.plist) and generate the kext. You don't need to change your SMBIOS, just use the new kext.
How are you measuring the 15 watt battery drain?
I'm pretty sure my SSDT turns off the card, if you have a 9700 it should work for you. I'm able to get down to a total drain of 12 watts. I think running 8 cores on a 17 inch screen results in a decent amount of drain, though it could be a USB issue keeping me from getting even lower power usage. Measured using coconutBattery.
