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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."
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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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.
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.
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.
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.