Testing Battery Life...

Hey all, I am pretty new to benchmarking, never really learned how or what to do, anyways, I am looking for some utility for testing battery life while on wifi, I am currently using BatteryBar free, which is nice, but only gives an available battery based on ALL usage, gaming/non gaming, everything, so I feel it is somewhat skewed (unless you look at battery life for all general usage, then it is great!). Any good recommendations?

 

Notebookcheck always uses BatteryEater:

Battery Eater (notebook benchmark tool) - Downloads

 

Thanks Fuzzy, I'll take a look at it, according to batterybar I am at like 3.5h which seems a little on the low side, kind of disappointing.

 

Is this while gaming on R1 or R2?

I get around the same 3hrs - 3.5 on R1 (overclocked) but with LED's switched off as well as bluetooth, WLAN and WWAN while gaming with dedicated graphics card.

I would say thats pretty good for gaming on the move, I think alienware state around 4 hours while gaming on the R1 but I havent managed that yet.

 

This is with some gaming but mostly internet surfing/movie viewing on the i5 proc, not overclocked, I leave wwan and bluetooth off in bios. TurboBoost is also inactive most of the time (still playing with using it or not). I rarely have any lights on, only in the dark will I turn them on for the keyboard.

 

Sorry not sure about the R2, maybe someone else can comment on that.

I only have the R1 at the moment with SU7300 which is overclocked.

I wouldnt say that was normal I get around 3hr - 3.5 and that is constant gaming until the battery loses power and switches off and around 6.0 - 6.5 hours of web browsing with WWAN on and lights off.

 

I am very disappointed in the battery life, probably just my ignorance, I was under the impression the i5 chips were actually lower power usage but I was very wrong apparently. I almost want to return it but I am not paying a 15% restock fee, that's the price difference. Oh well, live and learn I guess.

 

some R1 owners would love to exchange theirs with yours with extra cash if battery life is what you want for mobility.

 

I really am looking for the mobility, that's why I bought this, to be able to play the latest games (maybe not at max but play) but still get 7 hours of batteries with light surfing, hanging out at home (wherever that is). We will see, I am going to give it some time, I updated my nVidia drivers and have gotten my average up to over 4 hours. Still not anywhere near 7-8 liike I was expecting.

 

i heard of some users getting 5-to-5.5 hours which is pretty good imo. you're only getting about 4? what do you have your brightness set at?

 

Like I said earlier I haven't done a battery test or manually timed it, but my average with batterybar finally hit 4h5min today. I would guess I am probably pulling 5+ hours not gaming. I run a brightness of 30%, no lights, wwan off, bt off, wifi max power savings.

 

Battery Bar tells me my average is at 5:30. That's been calculated on a weeks worth of daily battery usage, where each day I'll take it from fully charged to automatically hibernating at 3%.

While I'm at work I'm generally unplugged and:

Screen at 30-50%
BT off
Backlighting off
1394 disabled in BIOS
Mostly default Balanced power plan, but occasionally I'll drop to Power Saver to see how long I can go

Lots of email correspondence (Outlook 2007)
Tons of surfing (FF)
Loads of concurrent VPN and RDP connections

I'd say that perhaps as much as 10% of my battery usage has included SD and 720p video playback using MPC-HC and CoreAVC so that CPU utilization is low. I haven't run any games while on battery, so my rate is pretty indicative of what you'd see under "normal" computer usage.