Dell XPS 15 7590 OLED Power Consumption Measurements: White Can Be Almost Two Times More Demanding Than Other Colors

Because of the way OLED works, it may be worth changing white backgrounds to something darker especially if your commonly used applications or web pages are predominately white. At the most extreme, white at maximum brightness will consume almost 14 W more than if the screen were only black.

by Allen Ngo, 2019/08/17

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We recently checked out the Razer Blade 15 OLED and discovered some interesting finds in regards to power consumption when displaying different colors at different brightness levels. Now that the Dell XPS 15 7590 OLED is out in the wild with a similar Samsung OLED panel as found on the Razer, we decided to run some of the same power consumption measurements to see if there are any patterns worth exploring.

For this test, we wanted to find out how much power the XPS 15 7590 OLED would consume when displaying all black, white, green, blue, or red at the minimum and maximum brightness settings. The laptop would be set to 'Better Battery' mode with the wireless disabled in order to keep background activity in check. We would also record only the average power consumption over a 30 second period in order to obtain more accurate readings. Our final results are recorded in the table below.

	Minimum Brightness Setting (W)	Maximum Brightness Setting (W)	Difference (W)
Displaying all Black	5.50	5.47	-0.03
Displaying all White	5.57	18.97	13.4
Displaying all Green	5.91	10.00	4.09
Displaying all Blue	6.29	13.24	6.95
Displaying all Red	6.06	11.15	5.09
Displaying Notebookcheck Home Page (screenshot)	6.10	16.81	10.71
Displaying Battle.net News Page (screenshot)	5.97	8.46	2.49

Some notable observations about OLED can be made based on the data collected:

Black consumes the same amount of power no matter the brightness setting
There are almost no power consumption differences between colors when at the minimum brightness setting
White will consume much more power than green, blue, or red when at higher brightness settings by as much as 9 W
Web pages that are predominately dark show only small differences in power consumption between minimum and maximum brightness settings
Web pages that are predominately white can consume 2x more power than a page that is predominately dark when at the maximum brightness setting

The results are of interest because they differ considerably from a laptop with a typical IPS display. The power consumption difference of an IPS laptop at the minimum and maximum brightness settings tends to be just ~6 W or less regardless of color or onscreen content. If you want to extend the battery life of your OLED laptop, you'll have to consider not just the brightness setting but also the colors on display.