19. Battery Tests

Battery Life/charge Time

Along with the normal performance benchmarks, we naturally also tested the battery life as well. The battery tests were conducted according to three different criteria, and in each case the battery was charged until completely full. The battery was then subjected to three tests: one with an Office program, one with a computer game, and for the last test, a DVD was set to run nonstop until the battery was empty.

In order to compare the results of the various notebooks, we set the display brightness of all notebooks to a fixed value of ca. 100cd/m².

If you've read the review of the Compaq nc8230, then you'll probably remember that when this unit is equipped with two batteries, the run time for Office applications can extend to nearly seven hours. When just the primary 71Wh high capacity battery is used, the laptop still has a run time of 3.8 hours. How long will the Compaq nx6125 with a Turion 64 CPU and 52 Wh battery last?

Well, after only two hours and eleven minutes, the Compaq nx6125 battery gave up the ghost, despite integrated graphic resolution. In contrast, the Dell Inspiron 6000 with a dedicated X300 GPU ran for a good 20 minutes longer with the same energy supply.

When running games and playing DVDs, the battery life of the two counterparts Compaq nx6125 and Inspiron 6000 differed only by a few minutes. The reason for this is that both gaming and playing DVDs puts greater energy demands on the graphic cores of both computers, which reduces the energy balance considerably.

By this point we started to wonder if HP didn't decide to save money in the wrong places. According to specs from AMD, the Turion 64 MT-34 is much more efficient than the Turion ML-34 that HP uses, and it only costs five dollars more. Our tests with the AMD Turion 64 MT-34 showed that the nx6125 ran nearly 10 minutes longer. Who knows, maybe HP wants to sell more travel batteries in the future. If you strap the 14.8-ounce (420 gram) battery to your laptop (which would cost $150 (€184)), you can at least double the run time figures.

A lot of users would have been happy to pay an extra five dollars for additional CPU power that would extend the battery life by 10 minutes at the same level of energy use.

This little piece of artistry, swapping the Turion 64 ML-34 for the MT-34, would lower the power input of the Compaq nx6125 by 10% on average, as can be seen in our calculations in the table above.