Core-Duo deceving battery life

Are u disappointed on the shorter battery life of the core-duo over the 'old' centrino? Correct me if i'm wrong but if I remember, Intel promised a better autonomy when they announced the core-duo. Or is it the batteries technology that doesn't evolves as fast as it should to support the cpu demands?

I think it now leaves the market wide open for Turion X2 64 in May 2006.

 

I voted yes, because of higher TDP for core duo than older sonoma platform.

It is worth considering that tomshardware talked about a possible problem with battery life and some centrino platforms, including 945 (duo).

worth a read if you're concerned: http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/01/28/toms_hardware_uncovers_power_drain_issue/

 

Yes. I hope there is a battery drain fix in the near future, but I definitely expected more. I know advertising is always misleading and I only expected a fraction of what they quoted, but I expected more than what I got.

 

That's so behind the times. The whole Core Duo battery myth was debunked by Anandtech weeks ago.

Anand proved it was a WinXP problem and that it affected Pentium M's also and worse than Core Duo. Go read his article and get your facts straight.

Hermit

 

Oh, and as Hermit stated, it's more of an XP problem than the duo core's...

 

ok, i have the a Core Duo(Acer). and i'm TOTALLY DISSATISFIED with the lack of battery life. I can get about 3 hours of life on a 9 cell battery (14.8V, 4800mah = 71watt hours).
I knew i couldnt trust the reports from Intel about phenomenal battery life, i thought 4 hours would be within reach(i hear it is for the Asus core duo). but 5 hours is just dreaming. i'm only getting 3 hrs. and now i'm just laughing when i hear that intel is trying to push the 8 hour mark, and how they are on track.

you could argue (righfully so) that a Core Duo is twice as powerful as its Pentium M counterpart, and it uses less watts per GHz. but getting back to the topic of the post...BATTERY LIFE.

bottom line, my Core Duo gets same amount of battery time as a Centrino platform. I was so pissed off when battery life on my brother's ThinkPad (6 cell battery) could easily match mine!

..wait..it gets worse battery life! He has a 6 cell in there, and i have a 9 cell! ok sure my GPU is way better than his and probably sucks more energy..but ****! not to mention the lack of undervolting options!

I wonder how a Core Solo is on battery...

 

Gino, that's pretty bad that you only get three hours - on a nine cell too.

My Sager is no king of battery life - it has a desktop graphics card, for starters - but on an eight cell, I get a little over two and a half (~2:45 +/- 10 mins). With a lower power consumption X1400, I'm surprised your Acer doesn't get more than mine. 3.5-4 sounds about right . .

Chaz

 

I love my LG T1. I'm hitting 5.5 hours on a 6 cell battery with 6/8 brightness, and almost that much even with the optical drive in constant usage. I don't see any battery problem....

 

I think the LG T1 is a Low Voltage Core Duo if i remember correctly. there is a HUGE difference in "official" power consumption numbers. i think a normal Core Duo (T2xxx series) is at 31 watts. a Low Voltage Core Duo (L2xxx) is at 15 watts.

 

Here are the facts : people are getting about 20% less battery life with Core-Duo than Centrino. That's it! XP bug or whatever you call it, they still got less autonomy than they had with centrino. Who care who's fault is or bug is it, if they still drain their 9 cells battery in 2.5 hours!?

-

 

Ill wait till I get my SZ and report back . Technically Intel should have made better battery life. Did anyone test the battery on SUSE Linux?

 

Well you've got underlines and bold text but no facts, where are your sources. What CPU are you comparing to Core Duo?

Centrino does NOT identify a CPU, it is simply a marketing term to say you have a an Intel CPU, Intel Chipset & Intel Wireless solution. There is a Centrino Duo after all. So what is your claim?

I clearly stated that Pentium M [a CPU] has a worse battery drain problem from this USB bug in WinXP than does Core Duo [a CPU]. Just what CPU are you referring to on your Centrino Platform? All you have to do is read Anand's article and you'd understand. Have you read his article?

So posting an inflamatory Poll knocking the Core Duo, when its a WinXP problem serves no useful purpose. If you'd correctly posted your poll in a WinXP forum and identified it as a WinXP issue that affects multiple CPU's then maybe some good would come out of it.

Hermit

 

21st hermit : seems likes everybody know what i'm talking about except you.

 

I'm using a ThinkPad X60s with an L2400 Core Duo (low voltage) and get 5h 59m of battery life -- it's the best I've ever had, but yes on battery it is underclocked significantly to obtain that battery life.

 

actually Hermit is the only one that knows what he is talking about. he has done his research and is correct. People aren't getting worse battery life with the Core Duo, they are getting worse battery life with Windows, which isn't a big issue and is easy to fix, and the fix has already been brought up many times. the fix has nothing to do with core duo, just windows.

and the Poll is a pretty big waste of time as the information it gives to the viewers doesn't mean anything since it isn't accurate.

 

Based on many reads and responses, looks like Low-Voltage Core-Duo are giving very good battery life, but not the regular Core-Duo.

But again, looks like we are only loosing less than 10-15% battery life with Core-Duo compared to P-M, where Core-Duo is much more powerful. May be after all it is not that bad.

 

Chinna that 10-15% is what we are paying 1800$+ for notebooks, **** Windows.

Microsoft better do something or **** will I be ticked. Low-Voltage duo cores would perform worse then normal voltage duo core's right?

 

I know, we do not want to loose even minute. But based on my understanding Microsoft bug only affects if you have USB device connected , and that too nothing specific to Core-Duo. So, I would not see how this would be because of that.

Atleast that is my understanding from detailed articles by Anandtech.com Tomshardware. Nothing specific to Core-Duo, but again if your laptop has an integrated USB device or if you have connected a external USB device.

 

the registery FIX did nothing to improve battery life in Windows.

 

FYI,

My LG T1 Battery Miser program just had an update today - the described reason for the update seems to imply that it deals with the usb device causing reduced battery life issue.

 

What a whyning for nothing. Get a life guys.

XP fault or another I still don't give a dam_n. For the record Anandtech clearly indicated that the fix doesn't always work and that numbers are still lowers with Core-Duo when battery are the same.
-

P.S. My poll is great and if u don't like it just don't vote!
-

 

Exactly.

USB bug doesn't explain why we still have very short results with, for example, most of the Dell's Core-Duo notebook ( 2.-2.5 hours at best with a monster battery). Same for Acer 5672 with a 9 cells batt. getting about the same pitty results.
-

 

Excuse me,
Does it safe to purchase core duo for now?..

 

Yes. All this is about is that there's a bug in Win XP that causes some of the Intel chips to suffer from shorter battery lifes than they should have. MS will probably address it within a month or so. They haven't released a super fast fix and that's pissed some people off. Unfortunately, MS probably wants to make sure they fix it correctly the first time and don't break anything else, so it'll probably take a bit of time before it comes out.

It's perfectly safe to purchase a Core Duo right now.

 

2.25 hrs with my 9-cell..****ty

 

lol thats hilarious. I would complain my ass off. What notebook and specs?

 

Maple... 2.5 hours of battery life for a 17 inch with a 7800 gpu and 2gb of ram... that seems pretty dang good to me. What do you expect from such a powerful pc?

 

Hey check this out everyone...I only have a 6 cell and I have unlimited battery life!!......plug it into a wall and stop complaining!! Oh, so you say plugging it into a wall isn't mobile enough? Well, there is a patch you can download that enables you to go anywhere you'd like and still have an unlimited supply of juice....I think it's called extensioncord.exe. Yeah, supposedly it's been out for a long time...you can get it at www.getonefromAceHardware.com =D

 

My personal experience:

System: Gateway NX860XL
CoreDuo @ 2.0Ghz
1GB RAM
100GB HD
DVD Burner
7800 GPU
17" 1680x1050 screen
8 cell battery

2 nights ago I was installing and configuring software while on battery power. I had an optical mouse plugged into a USB port. I was using the wireless internet and the DVD drive and hard drive were running almost constantly. I ran for over 2 hours and 15 minutes with no problem at all and the battery indicator (which I checked frequently) did not appear to be "lying" (counting the minutes down faster than actual time passing). It said I had about 36 minutes left when I finished my tasks.

So my battery life was easily better than 2.5 hours with heavy use. Not too shabby for a large laptop.

 

Core Duo
T2600 2 MB L2 2.16 GHz 667 MHz 31W
T2500 2 MB L2 2 GHz 667 MHz 31W
T2400 2 MB L2 1.83 GHz 667 MHz 31W
T2300 2 MB L2 1.66 GHz 667 MHz 31W
L2400 2 MB L2 1.66 GHz 667 MHz 15W
L2300 2 MB L2 1.50 GHz 667 MHz 15W

Core Solo
T1300 2 MB L2 1.66 GHz 667 MHz 27W

Pentium® M Dothan
775 2.13 GHz 533 MHz 27 W
770 2 GHz
760 1.86 GHz
750 1.73 GHz
740 1.60 GHz
730
765 2.10 GHz 400 MHz 21 W
755 2 GHz
745 1.80 GHz
735 1.70 GHz
725 1.60 GHz
715 1.50 GHz

Pentium M Banias
1.70 GHz 400 MHz 24.5 W
1.60 GHz
1.50 GHz
1.40 GHz
1.30 GHz

Pentium M Low Voltage
758 1.50 GHz 2 MB L2 cache 400 MHz 10 W
738 1.40 GHz
1.30 GHz 1 MB L2 cache 400 MHz 12 W
1.20 GHz 1 MB L2 cache 400 MHz 12 W
1.10 GHz

Petnium M Ultra Low Voltage
753 1.20 GHz 2MB 400 MHz 5W
733 1.10 GHz L2 cache
723 1 GHz
1.10 GHz 1 MB 400 MHz 7 W
L2 cache
1 GHz 1 MB 400 MHz 7 W
900 MHz L2 cache

 

What do you guys expect? Dual Core!!! Dual power consumption!!! Intel did a nice job on power consumption. They added another core without doubling the TDP. You guys want battery life, you have to sacrific performance...look at the Pentium M Ultra Low Volatage.....5WATT!!!!!!

You also have to consider that most of the time the Processor is in idle,sleeep,or power saving mode...it's the screen and wifi that mostly sucks that battery life.

 

i think you'd be hard pressed to buy a new lap-
top with a 1GHz-ish pentium-m processor though.

 

What I'm more disappointed in is the fact that it can't be undervolted below the stock voltage. I guess battery life takes a hit because of that as well.

 

For those of you using dual core processors, you may want to install this patch from Microsoft.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=918005

 

The core duo is pretty good. It offers 10-30% perfomance increase over the pentium-m on single threaded apps (vast majority of software/games) and offers 60% increase on multi threaded apps. According to this:

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2663&p=7

As more software utilise duo core expect 50% and above improvement over pentium-m so the increase in power consumption still offers better performance/watt. Nothing to complain about really except never to trust marketing hype/statements by Intel. They all "lie" to sell their products.

 

did anyone install that patch yet?

 

Yes. It seems to work for me.

 

I vote no. I'm going from an old Pentium 4, and that thing sucked the power. My 17" M90 gets better battery life than my old 14" Latitude C640. MUCH better. I'm not disappointed in the least. It may not be as long-lasting as a Pentium M, but multi-tasking and performance more than make up for that.

 

Would this update have been installed in auto-updates? How would you check?

 

Yes, since July.

 

Are you kidding me? You don't have to buy an ULV Pentium M in order to get battery life, a vanilla Dothan Pentium M will suffice!
I have an SL7ER, P-M 735 (1700mhz) 400FSB, 0.988/1.34v 7.5-21w TDP rated processor.(In IBM T42) I undervolted the processor to 1.116v top end and 0.716v low end. Why does this matter? For those who don't see the true significance for this, bare with me.

Here is an example:
The SL7EP (P-M 735) has 400FSB, 0.988/1.34v, 7.5-21 W TDP,
The SL7V3 (P-M 765) has 400FSB, 0.988/1.4 V, 7.5-21 W TDP.
The SL7V5 (P-M 710) has 400FSB, 0.988/1.34 V, 7.5-21 W TDP.
Notice a pattern? If you do, then you'd see that all the processors have the same "minimum and maximum voltage" and therefore have same TDP regardless of top speed.

Now watch closely. The following are LV Pentium Ms and ULV Pentium Ms (Dothan).
The SL7F3 (P-M LV 738) has 400FSB, 0.988/1.116 V, 7.5-10 W TDP.
The SL7V2 (P-M ULV 723) has 400FSB, 0.812/0.94 V, 3-5 W TDP.
The SL8LK (P-M ULV 773) has 400FSB, 0.812/0.94 V, 3-5 W TDP.

Notice something different from the vanilla Pentium Ms and the LV(Low Voltage) Pentium Ms? The TDP is reduced in the top end for the LV P-Ms but the bottom end remains. The top end voltage for the LV P-Ms is reduced and so is the top end TDP, however the low end voltage for the LV P-Ms remains and so does its TDP (7.5W).

The LV P-Ms have the same low end voltage and TDP as does the vanilla Pentium Ms, but the top end voltage and TDP is reduced for the LV Pentium Ms.

Now for the ULV P-Ms you'll see that the low end voltage+TDP and high end voltage+TDP has been reduced from where it is on the LV P-Ms and vanilla P-Ms.
So yes, the ULV Pentium M uses less power on the low end compared to the LV and the Vanilla Pentium M.

What is my point? Well my point is, if you can undervolt the Pentium M PAST THAT of the ULV Pentium M, then I've not only got a lower overall TDP but I now can achieve better battery life than that of a notebook equipped with a ULV processor!