AMD and Intel Mobile Rematch: Gateway NV5933u vs. Acer 5542
by Jarred Walton on June 18, 2010 1:14 AM ESTBattery Life Compared
The last time we looked at battery life, Intel's Core 2 platform had a clear lead over AMD. Both platforms have gotten faster, but what about battery life? As we showed last year with the Gateway NV52 and NV58, the choice of OS makes a difference. Again, we are using the Windows 7 results from the NV52/NV58 to keep things equal, which means battery life improved quite a bit over the Vista results.
And here's where things get interesting. Performance improved on both platforms, but our initial battery life testing shows that battery life actually got worse on both AMD and Intel. The closest result is for AMD on the Internet test, where the old and new platforms essentially tie. x264 battery life dropped 8% on both platforms as well. The big drops come in idle battery life and Internet on Intel. Both drop 18-19% in idle battery life, while the NV59 takes a relatively drastic hit of 25% in our Internet test. Not shown in the charts is Blu-ray battery life on the NV59, which we clocked at just 98 minutes. The extra power required to spin the optical drive plus the decoding of a 37Mbit AVC movie takes its toll on every laptop we've tested so far. We need much more than a 48Wh battery to get through most Blu-ray discs.
That said, we need to take these results with a grain of salt. The old Core 2 platform was very mature at the time of our previous testing, and we've seen other laptops offering impressive battery life using i-Series processors. The ASUS U30Jc is a smaller 13.3" LCD, but even taking that into account it was able to deliver 5.67 minutes per Wh of battery capacity, which is 50% higher than the 3.75 result of the NV59. Both the M300 and M600 laptops we tested continue to have a poor showing in battery life overall, with the higher clocked M600 generally trailing the M300. Both are rated as 35W TDP, but all 35W processors are not created equal.
The real question is how optimized the notebooks are in terms of power saving features. We saw a BIOS/VBIOS update on MSI's GX640 improve battery life by up to 50%. It's doubtful that we'd get that much of an improvement on IGP-based laptop designs, but ASUS' Power4Gear utility has proven useful in boosting battery life in our testing by allowing you to disable the optical drive and webcam when you're on battery power. We'd like to see more manufacturers include such utilities, as well as simply putting more effort into creating a power efficient platform. Whether it's lack of power optimizations, immature platforms, old battery technology, or some other factor, the fact remains that both of the newcomers offer disappointing battery life.
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silverblue - Friday, June 18, 2010 - link
...PLEASE stop using the 4200 unless you're going to offer an automatically switchable and far superior discrete option. Would it be outlandish to use the Mobility 5470 at the very least instead of throwing out the same 500-700MHz 40SP solutions?JarredWalton - Friday, June 18, 2010 - link
We should be seeing the Toshiba Satellite A665D-S6059 soon, which combines the HD 4250 with a discrete HD 5650 and provides switching functionality. It also has the Phenom II P920 quad-core (only 1.6GHz though). I'm certainly interested in seeing how it works, and hopefully GPU driver updates won't be a problem... except it looks like Toshiba is opting out of AMD's Mobile Driver program. Ugh.ferro_i - Friday, June 18, 2010 - link
AMD processor, the previous platform. (Tigris platform 2009, DDR2).İntel Mobile i3-i5 series should be compared with platform AMD Danube (2010).
JarredWalton - Friday, June 18, 2010 - link
I think it's fair in that we're comparing laptops that have both been around for four months. But you're right, Danube is the real comparison now and we're working to get some appropriate laptops. I inadvertently lumped all the new AMD laptops under the Nile header, but that's the ultraportable version of Danube; we should have both in the next couple of weeks.veri745 - Sunday, June 20, 2010 - link
Agreed. We already know the DDR2 AMD platforms have crappy battery life. I'd really like to see the Danube and Nile platforms reviewed.fabarati - Friday, June 18, 2010 - link
Good thing to note: Core i5s and i7s have a higher clocked IGP, 766 vs 677 in the i3s. Performance probably won't go up a lot, but maybe a fps or two.By the way, are you guys gonna review the Dell Vostro 3500?
JarredWalton - Friday, June 18, 2010 - link
We can ask for the Vostro 3500... no idea if we'll get one. As for the GPU clock, that's a good point. Is there a good utility to show your current clock? I have no idea if the NV5933u every scaled up to 667 or not; GPUZ and CPUZ don't report the IGP frequency on Intel.KaarlisK - Sunday, June 20, 2010 - link
Not always, it won'tSince the IGP has to Turbo up to get to either 677 or 766, and the i5s and i7s have higher CPU frequencies, there is sometimes less power/heat headroom for the GPU to actually clock up.
mojtabaalemi - Friday, June 18, 2010 - link
could you please add 1005p in your battery life test .and by the way was 1005pe with 3150 igp capable of 720p x264 video ?
JarredWalton - Friday, June 18, 2010 - link
We never had the 1005p for testing (or any other 3-cell netbook), so I'm not sure what it does for battery life other than it would be lower. :-) Relative battery life should be about the same, though, so at 23Wh it should last roughly half as long as the 1001p.The 1005pe (and any other Pine Trail netbook as well as the older N270/N280) is capable of 720p x264 if you use the CoreAVC codec; anything else and you drop frames in my experience. Higher bitrate 720p would also cause problems, and you get tearing (no VSYNC) with CoreAVC in my experience. As far as Internet video (Flash... not sure about the HTML5 stuff yet), Atom fails utterly unless you get ION/NG-ION.