I ditched my charger for the day and played chicken with my laptop’s battery — it was close

I will never travel without my laptop charger, so leaving it at home to play chicken with my laptop’s battery isn’t exactly what I’d call a good time. But I did it anyway and I was pleasantly surprised.

It’s one thing to run a standardized battery test for a laptop, it’s another to get hands-on use unique to your own experience. Which is exactly what I did with the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5x Gen 11 packed with the latest Snapdragon X2-42 Plus chipset. Snapdragon chips have been killing it on the battery life front lately, so I was a little more confident about my chances.

This is my journey with the Snapdragon X2-42 Plus unplugged.

A day in my life

First things first, I disabled Energy Saver because I wanted to get consistent performance with little throttling. However, I did put it in “Best Power Efficiency” mode, so I wasn’t killing the battery with casual tasks, either.

100% — 8:34 a.m. I started my day like I always do — with a cup of coffee in my hand, a Word document in front of me, and a dozen tabs open of research. Because I hate myself, I recently shelved writing one fantasy novel and started another, and so I’ve been blazing through what I want to do for this little romantasy I’ve envisioned. That, of course, required my characters to wear fancy outfits. There are a ridiculous number of clothing items, especially relative to a fantasy-era world, that I simply did not know the name of. I didn’t know what a cravat was (it’s like a scarf but a tie). I hate writing clothing descriptions. Next thing I know, several hours have gone by.

76% — 12:23 p.m. I decided to pivot from book writing to checking off my adult to-dos, like replying to emails and messages, managing payments and scheduling appointments. You know, the stuff that I’d rather not be doing but I really have to do. During which I was being serenaded by Frieren: Beyond Journey's End-inspired lo-fi music on Spotify, which I simply can’t get enough of… And then I just started watching Frieren.

58% — 3:15 p.m. After a totally normal number of episodes of Frieren, I started playing some Hollow Knight. I did only play for thirty minutes so I wouldn’t tank the battery too hard, though. To that point, the Snapdragon X2-42 Plus doesn’t throttle the way x86 chips do.

During my Hollow Knight journey, I enabled “Best Performance” mode in the battery settings since this was a slightly more demanding task. Well, not really. However, I did play Hollow Knight both on and off the battery, and there was virtually no difference in performance (358 fps to 355 fps).

I also tested this in the Geekbench 6 overall performance test, where the Snapdragon X2-42 Plus scored only a 2% decrease in multi-core performance and a 1.3% decrease in single-core performance when unplugged. Unlike its competition, which ends up losing around 20% of the power, the Snapdragon X2-42 Plus maintains a steady pace while unplugged. During my hands-on experience, both with “Best Performance” and “Best Power Efficiency,” I didn’t feel like I lost any significant performance during my tasks.

30% — 3:45 p.m. I jumped back into writing, except this time I was planning my next D&D session, where my players will be getting into pitched combat with a demon who’s naturally trying to destroy their home. Spoiler alert: It’s a tough fight. And because I like to write extensive descriptions, I did this for quite a few hours.

10% — 7:02 p.m. At this point I’ve burnt myself out for the day, so I decided to chill out and watch "Jujutsu Kaisen" (a not very chill show) until the battery inevitably died. I was able to watch four and a half episodes before it kicked the bucket.

0% — 8:38 p.m. The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5x Gen 11 lasted roughly 12 hours on my very mixed day. It’s important to note (as I’m sure you noticed) that gaming in between took a tremendous amount out of the battery life in just a short period of time. But I’m a gamer, so I had to get some time in squashing bugs.

Average battery life and unthrottled performance

I recognize that most folks aren’t going to jump into gaming, especially on an ARM-based chip where there are very few options abound. However, even for thirty minutes of gaming, it cost the Snapdragon X2-42 Plus a shocking number of hours.

For context, I spent a couple days testing the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5x Gen 11 using it casually with apps like Google Chrome, Spotify, YouTube, and Discord at 50% brightness, and I clocked just a little over 16 hours of battery life. I am very on and off with my laptop use, but if I worked for eight hours a day straight with no breaks, I could squeeze in two days' worth of work without having to reach for my charger.

Now, one of the reasons why the battery life tanked is likely that the Snapdragon X2-42 Plus doesn’t throttle the performance when it’s on battery. I tested it with a slew of CPU and GPU-focused benchmarks and it barely slowed down. I even played Cyberpunk 2077 on the IdeaPad Slim 5x and do you know what the difference was? Absolutely nothing.

With the settings at Low with AMD’s Super Resolution set to Performance, the Snapdragon X2-42 Plus managed 33 fps both plugged and unplugged. Even with frame generation enabled, I got 43 fps both times.

So while it’s excellent that the Snapdragon X2-42 Plus doesn’t let up when you’re unplugged, it will sink the battery like a cannon-ball sized hole in your ship. However, if you’re a real casual user, the Snapdragon X2-42 Plus is crafted to last for days.

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