6. MobileMark 2005 Battery Benchmarks Conclusions

The Toshiba R200 did not do as well as the Fujitsu B6110D on the MobileMark 2005 on-battery office productivity performance test. We ran this test three times and got very nearly the same results. We suspect the performance differential is due to the way Toshiba has implemented automatic on-battery CPU speed control. It appears that CPU speed is aggressively reduced in order to increase battery life. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that, when plugged into an AC outlet, the R200 does quite well on the SYSmark 2004 SE and PCMark05 tests when compared to the Fujitsu B6110D. We have asked Toshiba for comments and will post them here as soon as we receive them.

The MobileMark 2005 battery life tests are not surprising. While both laptops deliver very good battery life, the Fujitsu, with its higher capacity battery consistently provides more run time: 18% for office productivity, 20% for research and reading and 8% for wireless Web browsing.

We did not run the MobileMark 2005 DVD playing battery life benchmark. The benchmark assumes that the DVD player is powered by the computer's battery. This is an easy assumption with larger notebook computers that have built-in DVD players. Neither the Fujitsu nor the Toshiba have built-in DVD players. To run fair tests we would have to find a USB DVD player that can run off the power from a USB connection on all computers we test now and in the future. Our tests show that this is impossible. We were able to run the DVD benchmark on the Toshiba R200 using a low powered Toshiba USB DVD drive that ran fine using only power from the R200's USB connector. When we attempted to use the same drive on the Fujitsu B6100D, the DVD drive worked only when the drive's battery was inserted or the drive was running off its AC adapter. That would not be a fair test, of course, because the DVD drive would not drain the laptop's battery.

For the record, the Toshiba R200 benchmarked at 166 minutes in the MobileMark 2005 DVD playing test. While still impressive, that is 81 and 95 fewer minutes respectively than the R200 achieved in the office productivity and research and reading benchmark tests.