Lenovo Legion laptop power modes are seemingly buggy with unusually short battery life

In our review on the latest Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 15, we tested battery life in two different settings: Power Saver and Balanced. Power Saver involves setting the display to the minimum brightness level, Windows to 'Best power efficiency' mode, WLAN off, iGPU on, and Lenovo Vantage to Quiet mode. In other words, performance and consumption should be reduced to their bare minimum levels for the longest possible battery life.

When the IdeaPad Gaming 3 15 was set to Power Saver, however, we recorded an abnormally short runtime of only 2 hours and 22 minutes before needing to recharge. We decided to run the test a second time and results would not improve. Oddly enough, battery life would be as high as 6.5 hours when set to Balanced mode instead.

We initially thought the problem may have been limited to our specific IdeaPad Gaming 3 15 model or test unit, but we again experienced a similar problem on the latest Lenovo Legion 7 16. When set to Power Saver, battery life would last for only 4 hours and 53 minutes compared to 7 hours and 16 minutes when set to Balanced.

We're not sure of the exact cause, but we can say that our two problematic models are each equipped with AMD Zen 3+ CPUs and similar Lenovo Vantage software updated to the latest version at the time of publishing. If you have a Lenovo laptop powered by an AMD Zen 3+ CPU, then we recommend double-checking your battery life in both Power Saver and Balanced modes via Vantage.