10. Power Consumption Tests

We wanted to be particularly thorough with the power consumption tests, because after all, we are talking of notebooks here. Luckily, we were able to test all chips on virtually identical platforms. Due to the fact that Mobility Radeon 9000 does not yet come with ATi's 'PowerPlay' power saving feature enabled, we wanted to be fair and ran all chips at their normal 'full performance' settings. We split the benchmarks in three.

First, we did a battery rundown while a perpetual slideshow was running, to simulate normal work on the computer, like e.g. giving a PowerPoint presentation to a customer. In this case, the system is idle most of the time.

Many people use their notebook as DVD-player when they are traveling. Our second battery rundown was while playing back a DVD (Castaway) in full screen mode. In this case, the graphics chip, as well as the CPU, has to do quite a bit more work than in case of the slideshow. Hence, the rundown times are shorter.

Finally, we ran a perpetual 3D gaming demo and took the time until the battery was empty. In this case, the CPU, as well as the graphics chip, has a lot of work to do, so the power consumption is significantly higher than in the above two cases, and the battery rundown times are much shorter.

Slideshow Battery Rundown Test

I was very impressed to see that Mobility Radeon 9000 uses just as little power as its predecessor Mobility Radeon 7500. The two NVIDIA chips are only a little bit behind, with the upcoming GeForce4 Go460 running out of power only four minutes sooner than M9.