13. Unplugged Testing

The Mayhem G3 is a mobile device, so we tested the life of the system unplugged. One serious issue we encountered immediately was the fact that there is a locked setting in the BIOS that automatically downclocks the CPU to 800MHz (200MHz with a 4x multiplier) whenever the AC power is turned off.

Here is a screenshot with both AMD's PowerNow! Dashboard and Microsoft's Power Options window both open. Notice that there isn't a battery icon in the bottom right hand corner... that is because the power adapter is plugged in.

Generally, AMD's PowerNow! will allow the user to determine the level at which they wish to drain the battery. We set the power to "Always On," which should cause the CPU and GPU to run at full speed even when there is no AC power - but this wasn't the case with the Mayhem G3. Within 5 seconds of going on battery, the system would override the user setting and clock down to 800MHz. We launched AMD's Dashboard application so we could see the system clock changing. We then switched the power setting to "Max Battery" and back again to "Always On." Within 5 seconds, every time, the system would ignore the user setting and return to 800MHz.

Now with the power adapter unplugged you can see the battery icon stating that the system is on its own power. Notice the drop in the CPU utilization and the change in the battery maximization.

This automatic speed reduction would be a great feature if the Mayhem G3 were an office productivity notebook. But even though it certainly achieves amazing frame rates in Microsoft Word and Minesweeper, this is a gaming laptop. If a user wants to flat-line the battery in ten minutes because they simply must finish that level of Half Life 2, they should be able to do so.

Due to this "power coup d'état," our efforts at running continuous loops of 3DMark 2001 until the battery died were rather pointless. The unit did run for an hour and fifty minutes, but that was at 800MHz and needless to say, the graphics were not very impressive.