4. When You Need To Be "Cheap" With The Battery Power, Call In The PowerMizer

We were first introduced to NVIDIA's PowerMizer technology with the GeForce2Go product line. Many were less than impressed with the power consumption of the GeForce2Go. Of course, we are not sure that proper testing was done to verify the impact of PowerMizer on overall system performance. Power consumption remains a major issue if you wish to use your notebook to achieve true mobility. It is difficult for NVIDIA alone to shoulder the load of this burden when the current notebook designs are ahead of the projected power consumption curve.

When talking about using a notebook on battery power, many talk about the ultimate goal of being able to run full power for four hours. Currently, battery chemistry is still holding us back. Battery technology has evolved, but the kind of big breakthrough that is necessary in order to move battery technology to the next level is still on the horizon. In the meantime, notebooks have found other ways to maximize power usage, while still having to deal with the advances in new notebook technology.

PowerMizer addresses these concerns by allowing you to manually throttle power usage of the GeForce4 Go on the fly, via the PowerMizer control panel. The PowerMizer control panel provides for three settings, which will increase or decrease the power requirements of the GeForce4 Go. These three settings are: Maximum Battery Life; Maximum Performance; and Balanced, which balances both performance and battery life.

A look at the PowerMizer control panel.

It should be noted that, as with the ATI Mobility Radeon 7500, the GeForce4 Go still requires the OEM to offer all of the power management options that the product has to offer. Neither NVIDIA nor ATI can control what level of function the OEM chooses to offer its end users. We have been told that many OEMs choose not to offer these advanced power management options because they fear the possible increase in support costs, due to possible user problems.

The native drivers that we were provided with had the PowerMizer option hidden and not enabled. NVIDIA provided us with a registery key that would enable PowerMizer within drivers for testing. Many OEMs still are on the conservitive side when it comes to the certification of new technology for notebooks. It should come as no surprise that until OEMs have logged a significant amount of testing miles on these new power management technologies, they are going to be slow to add them. We understand that power management can be a cause of stability issues with today's notebooks, but still feel that giving the user the option to enable or disable them is better than ignoring the existance of the technology. We continue to call on OEM's to provide full support for all forms of power management technology. As we understand it, Dell, for example, has opted not to support or offer PowerMizer at this time.