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Asus Promises 12-Hour Battery Life In New High-End Laptop
Asus' new high-end laptop could finally be the traveler's best accoutrement, touting twelve-hour battery life thanks to intelligent, second-by-second switching between the two GPUs and automatic, on-the-fly re-clocking of the Intel Core i7 CPU. All this also comes in with a price tag of just over $1,000. "ASUS's solution is different because it's user-transparent; even a novice user will get the fullest possible benefit because the laptop itself is deciding when to switch. The same principle applies to the dynamic CPU clocking. ASUS includes a desktop widget to track CPU clock speed. While using the UL80JT, I could see it moving up and down with what I did; up with program openings and CPU-intensive processes, and way down at idle. Between the GPU switching, dynamic clocking, and ASUS's other power management features, the UL80JT manages to consume less than half as much power as the unibody Macbook while browsing."
"Dynamic clocking" my foot! I won't buy it unless it has a big, red "Turbo" button.
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Why hasn't anyone come up with this before? Or if they have, where are the others?
Promising 12 battery life is one thing.
Actually delivering acpi that is not crap is another.
I guess we'll wait and see.
Vendors promise all sorts of things. That doesn't make them true. I'll believe it when I see Tom's Hardware or someone equally competent test one of these things and they actually get 12 hours.
Until then, I'll file this one under "vendors promise the world".
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This thing is as old as my beat up Pentium III Inspiron 5000. Varying GPU clocks is also old.
What is interesting is seamless switching between GPUs. Everything else is just marketingese for "we do what everyone else does and we actually bothered to put some extra effort into power optimization".
I can't be the only one that laughed when I read:
"High-end laptop ... with a price tag of just over $1,000."
Maybe I'm just still used to Laptops being well over $1000. The last one I bought was a Lenovo T61 with an Intel graphics card and it was over $1K. I wouldn't consider it "high-end."
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
ASUS's solution is different because it's user-transparent; even a novice user will get the fullest possible benefit because the laptop itself is deciding when to switch. The same principle applies to the dynamic CPU clocking.
So what they mean is that the laptop will be deciding when it should be fast or slow, with no input from the user? How's this different than the gazillion power management settings we have now (except switching between GPUs of course)?
I am also not sure I like the sentiment of "user-independent" is somehow more beneficial to the user. It sounds too much like the drivel from the RIAA/MPAA: "we will enhance customer value by increasing the price and decreasing what they can do with it."
These guys always seem to want to show speed and power in a laptop -- but what I need in a laptop is long battery life. How much CPU does it take to do a bit of web browsing, run up emacs & ssh. I have a PC at home or stuff that I ssh to if I need to do fast compiles or run databases & other heavy stuff. These guys just don't get it, I thought they had when they brought out the original eeepc -- but subsequent models have just turned to bloat (OK: I do like the larger screens, but that is all).
Thing is, for, say, students (and not necessarily HS or undergraduates, this applies to law/med/grad as well), this is nearly the perfect blend. A laptop that *can* last for 5 hrs while note-taking and yet be used for gaming or general more sophisticated work with stats packages/modeling tools/etc as well. At $1,000 price point it's still not that expensive, in the same ballpark as the base model macbook/macbook pro. If this does get the battery life they claim, or close to it, I could see myself buying one...
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
I have an Asus U80 laptop ($650) with a stated battery life of 7 hours (without Wifi). I've gotten 6 hours with Wifi and 8 hours without. Even with fairly heavy web browsing and CPU usage, I can get 4-5 hours in Battery mode. Thus, while many battery life claims are bullshit, I am inclined to believe Asus. Note that Asus uses some proprietary Windows software to reduce power usage. Without the software, the battery lasted 33-50% less.
As an aside, they also have excellent RMA service. I discovered that my laptop drive had several bad sectors. I called Asus, and after less than a 5 minute wait was talking to a human being. I explained that a low-level drive scan showed several bad sectors on the drive, and that this indicated a hardware rather than software problem. Rather than having me reinstall Windows, or some other bs, I was told I could return the laptop or the bare drive for service with a 2-3 day turnaround. I shipped the bare drive, and received a replacement 2 business days after they received the RMA drive. Not bad.
Yeah, and we'll have a man on Mars in 2035, Obama will change Washington, and Duke Nuke'em Forever will be out any day now.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Looks to me like the software to accomplish this is one of those programs the manufacturer bundles on your computer, not an architectural change. If I have to tolerate a 6 month trial of MS Office, Norton Antivirus, several dozen casual games distributed as adware, and whatever other "productivity" software they decide I want, then no thanks. Bundled software should be possible to separate from each other.
Another important question: will it run Linux?
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
To me, a highend laptop is still 3k. (and really they still are) Heck I still remember 5-8k laptops and 5-8k was a lot more money 15 years ago than it is now...
Plus since when is an Asus laptop highend? Every Asus product I've ever had was a value purchase, and definitely subpar in the quality department.
There's a review at:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/asus-ul80vt
They got a runtime of 9hrs 11min while web browsing, but it was running faster than expected so they thought that 10 hrs wasn't out of the realm of possibility.
Consumer electronics are cheaper in the states, so you can't compare like that. What ships for $1000 often costs EU 1000 (=$1450!) or even more in Europe.
So basically it's like the task manager?
Umm, no. The task manager only shows CPU usage as a percentage of maximum usage at either present or maximum clock speed. This widget duplicates a graph shown in the Win7 Resource Monitor and tracks the actual CPU clock speed (in gigahertz), because the auto-clocking software changes the CPU speed in response to demand. My Win7/Core2 machine does this, but presumably ASUS is more aggressive in clocking down the i7 chip.
You are the reason a 5-room bungalow near Cupertino costs $2.5 million.
I think this article uses >$1000 to mean "high end" because it assumes the people buying them are not insane or status-whores.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I wish they'd start speccing battery life numbers based off h264 playback rather than DVDs. Or more to the point, include a dedicated lower-power decoder chip. I haven't touched DVDs in quite a long time, but between ripped movies and web streaming, there's a ton of h264 playback going on. I haven't done benchmarks on battery drain, but the extra CPU juice required (compared to mpeg2/4) seems to more than offset the savings of not having a dvd drive spinning the whole time. The high WiFi activity during most video playback doesn't help either.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
My Thinkpad T400 has two GPUs. One is an Intel GMA4500, the other is an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3400. Running with the Intel GPU cuts off a full third of my power consumption because it uses the main CPU and main memory instead of dedicated chips. But switching between the two GPUs is iffy at best and usually requires a reboot. If I get stuck on the Intel GPU then I can't play games until I reboot and switch to the ATI GPU, so I usually stay on the ATI unless I really need battery life.
What is significant about what ASUS is doing is the PC will *automagically* switch to the high-performance GPU when you start up a game or a flash video, then switch back when you go back to word processing. This is something that has never been done before and is a major step towards making "switchable graphics" truly useful.
That is, of course, assuming that the ASUS power management app doesn't crash all the time leaving your system in an unstable state.
I have a T400 as well, but I can usually (like 98% of the time) switch between cards without a reboot. Are you sure you got the right drivers and stuff? I think if you remove all of the default Lenovo software, you end up with some problems. You need to keep the Lenovo battery/power management software (sweet! two battery gauges).
One of the GPUs is, almost definitely, whatever GPU was integrated into the chipset. It'll be weak as hell; but use minimal power and be virtually free in terms of board space and bill of materials.
The second GPU will be whatever they picked for when actual performance is needed. It will add cost, space, and heat; but there is really no alternative if you want to have actual power available. Odds are, it uses more power in its lowest stable voltage/clock state than the integrated GPU does at full power.
If I'm not mistaken, batteries generate less heat when you pull out less current. A battery made up of very many cells should dissipate less heat per unit area than a more compact one.
Maybe you should rethink your definition of quality.
Synopsis:
SquareTrade analyzed failure rates for over 30,000 new laptop computers covered by SquareTrade Laptop Warranty plans and found that one-third of all laptops will fail within 3 years. SquareTrade also found that netbooks are 20% more unreliable than other laptops, and that Asus and Toshiba are the most reliable laptop brands.
http://www.squaretrade.com/pages/laptop-reliability-1109
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Your wish is granted. Anandtech tested the battery life with x264 720P video and they got about 6 hours out of it.
http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=3689&p=7