Benchmark Results: Battery Life
Running a desktop replacement or gaming notebook on battery power is almost an exercise in futility. Simply powering some of these systems on eats up six or seven percent of the battery. We set all four systems to their Balanced power plans and specified that the display/hard drive were to never switch off.
We ran all four machines through two rounds of BatteryEater Pro, an excellent alternative to MobileMark 2007’s battery test (one product in a family of horribly buggy benchmarks). There are a handful of different workloads you can apply through BatteryEater, but we used the classic test running an OpenGL-rendered window until depletion. In other words, these aren’t the run times you’d expect when gaming on these machines. Rather, it’s a medium workload that should reflect constant use (another workload included with BatteryEater measures battery life at continuous idle).
Not surprisingly, the notebook you’d be least likely to use away from an outlet is Killer Notebooks’ Odachi. Maybe even more shocking though, is that Alienware’s m17x only lasts about three minutes more, despite its Core 2 Extreme processor and mobility-optimized chipset.
The two Centrino 2 notebooks steal the show when it comes to longevity. Eurocom’s Montebello is able to almost double the run time of the Odachi—never mind that it’s sporting a Core 2 Extreme X9100 running at more than 3 GHz. ASUS adds an extra 15 minutes on top of that, even though the G71 wields two hard drives.
We made it a point to emphasize performance over all else in requesting these machines. But it’s certainly good to know that even as Eurocom and ASUS trail in the benchmarks, they are able to redeem themselves in measures of efficiency. With that said, anyone who wants to play the latest gaming titles without a power outlet handy is still looking at a short-lived experience, regardless of the platform one uses.
Latest Notebooks News
Latest Notebooks reviews
- 23/01 – Radeon HD 6990M And GeForce GTX 580M: A Beautiful Lie
- 03/01 – Eurocom Racer: Radeon HD 6990M In A Truly Mobile Form Factor
- 02/01 – Samsung Series 7 11.6" Slate: Breathing New Life Into...
- 02/12 – Motorola's Xoom Family Edition Review: Not Just For The...
- 24/11 – The Amazon Kindle Fire: Benchmarked, Tested, And Reviewed
Your blog is very helpful to me.I have got good and useful information about Laptops,note books and coputers and it can be helpful for other users also.For Laptops and note books I would suggest This site:http://www.testseek.com/
Please use Propper size pictures as i am not zooming every one (takes 3-4 secs to load each one when doing that)
even when i use the Print option thay are still in 200 x 120 pixels when it should be 450 x 271 pixels for both print and per page viewing
rest of the review is good
Okay, I have no idea about the battery life of ANY of the contenders - no mention of them in the text and that one vital image of the battery chart is missing from Toms. Good going guys!
Not that you can claim credit for any of the graphs on this article - all the rest are borked as well. They do show up - as tiny thumbnails. Nice one. Real classy.
Now back to the actual article subject, aka Rant#2. Hasn't it occured to the OEMs that we have a major niche going unfulfilled here? I can think of several nomadic user bases (how about students for starters anyone?) who want gaming laptops but who are unwilling to part with €5000 for something that has the same performance as a €500 desktop. Even with Centrino 2 bringing the RAM and motherboard back up to scratch the near-inability to run games such as SupCom and Crysis shows that the gap between standard and mobile CPUs and GPUs is now reaching crisis point.
You'd think that with such a large potential user base some of the big facs or OEMs would be innovating, but they ain't. AMD seem to have given up on mid-high-range lappies entirely, which give nVidia and Intel carte blanche to sit there doing very little (note to Nintel fanboys - this is what would happen to desktops if your hated AMD died for you - €5000 desktops to not-run Crysis). And yet OEMs continue to specify WUXGA screens that the tiny GPUs cannot hope to power, and all that HD clarity will go out the door if you drop down the res - LCDs suffer badly when running resolutions that aren't native or a root of 2 of the native (and the root-2 res for WUXGA is 950*600 - nonstandard and way too small for use!). Why aren't OEMs using high-quality (and potentially cheaper) 1650*1080 or even 1440*900 screens instead?
As for processors... if Intel really gave a damn they should have implemented mobile quads that electrically isolate half the cores when away from AC, halving TDP. Even without this some OEMs should have put in BIOS tools that overclock and underclock CPU/GPUs depending on power status (battery, AC...). Nope. Asus did try, bless 'em, but their lappy isn't even a high-end gaming machine! Desktop-replacers take note. Alienware should be taking notes - they could really do with those features, especially as their machine is supposed to be a gaming lappy - unlike Killer, who isn't afraid to admit their "laptop" is really a small desktop light enough to be carried
At least AW got the ventiltion right... everyone else still has easily-blocked fan ports on the bottom. Why hasn't Clevo tried to put some side intakes on their larger units yet?
guess thay do not bother to read these posts any way
them pictures are to small mite be ok if my desktop was at 640x480, mite even be viewable on my PDA (if it was not for the best of media stuff)