Workbook charger can't keep up

[s_crosby]

Running FAH with my MacBook Pro (circa 2015, 2.5 GHz Intel Core i7, OS 10.14.6) plugged into the charger, even on "Light Folding Power", the battery gradually drains down to 4% where it hovers indefinitely. Are there tweaks I should make?
Seth Crosby
Washington University

[JimboPalmer]

Is your charger 85W?
https://www.amazon.com/Charger-Magsafe- ... B07XGPHXNW

[Joe_H]

Welcome to the folding support forum.

For starters, which power adapter are you using with your MacBook Pro? The 60 W power adapter supplies enough to either run the MacBook Pro and its display at full, or charge, but not both at the same time. It will also depend on whether you have something else running at the same time as the folding client and screen brightness setting.

As for tweaks, at the Light setting the client uses half of the available CPU threads, 4 if I am reading the right specs for your system having an i7-4870HQ. You can manually set the thread count lower using the Configure / Slot in FAHControl.

[foldy]

Again bad design by Apple. A power supply should power the PC and charge its battery at the same time.

[Joe_H]

Or the Power Management Unit needs resetting or is missing a firmware update. Usually the PMU would throttle the CPU to keep from drawing down the battery in such situations.

This also is not a problem exclusive to Apple, there are many PC laptops out there which at max CPU power and/or screen brightness do not have power adapters that supply enough to run at full tilt and charge the battery.

[foldy]

Bad design for many PC laptops power supplies then. If I know my PC can take upto 200 watts and the battery needs 50 watts to load then I should provide a 250 watts power supply.

[toTOW]

My ASUS ROG laptop has a 230W power supply ... I haven't seen any issue like this. Although my battery died a long time ago and has been removed to lighten the system.

[s_crosby]

Dropping the CPU to 2 worked like a charm!
If you've the time and inclination, a follow-up question: what is the difference between CPU# and the "Folding Power". Before adopting your suggestion, I had tried to turn the 'power' down, which did not help. After adopting CPU=2, I went ahead and turned the power back up again, and all is well!

[Joe_H]

If by turning the "power" down you mean that you moved the slider to Light, that depends on whether the CPU thread count setting was left at the default of -1. That -1 leaves thread usage up to the client and the slider setting. Full uses all threads available. Medium uses one less, and Light uses half of the available CPU threads.

When you manually set the thread count, that overrides the slider setting. The only effect setting it at Light will have is that setting overrides the setting for "on battery". At Light a system running on battery will always pause, which is the default. There is a setting to allow a laptop to fold on battery, I use it with mine so having the MagSafe connector briefly off doesn't pause folding. But otherwise I would not fold on battery, that runs it down too fast.