25. Battery Life

While speed and features are obviously important, for a majority of notebook users battery life is a prime purchase criterion, if not the deciding factor. To find out if the Asus V6000V runs faster and longer than the previous generation running on the 855PM, we chose the Asus W1000 for a comparison. Detailed specifics on the configuration of the two systems may be found above in the section entitled "Features of the test and comparison systems".

Mobilemark certifies that the new platform is 5% faster. In view of the fact that in the V6000V the new Pentium M 770 with its core clock speed of 2.13 GHz uses a faster FSB clock and a dual-channel memory interface, that differential is fairly disappointing. If you also consider also that there is a 2.0 GHz Pentium M 755 chugging away inside the W1000N, the "novelty effect" dissipates entirely.

Battery life is a big minus with notebooks having dedicated PCIe graphics. Due to the PCIe GPUs greater need for power compared to the "old" AGP solutions, energy consumption is a few watts more. Consequently, battery life is up to 20 minutes less.

This next analysis reveals that the effect observed is not solely due to the different levels of power consumption by the two systems' backlights. Here we deactivated the backlights on both notebooks. Both systems run longer like this, but the Sonoma system with a dedicated PCIe graphics chip runs out of steam a half-hour sooner.

Next we considered what happens when:

Can the new platform make up lost territory due to the much lower power consumption by the DDR2 memory under these circumstances?

Apparently not. We simulated the scenario described above in this fashion: while running the Prime95 benchmark test we tracked battery life within a file, while the backlight was deactivated. The CPUs in both systems were running at minimum clock speed with the "Presentation" power scheme selected.