ASUS UL80Vt Battery Life

Battery Life - Idle

Battery Life - Internet

Battery Life - x264 720p

Relative Battery Life

The coup de grace for the UL80Vt is the battery life. Look at those charts and try to find anything else for $800 that can match the ASUS UL80Vt. (Note: the ASUS UL30Vt doesn't count, since it's pretty much the same laptop in a slightly smaller package.) Netbooks are able to offer competitive battery life, sure, but they're less than half as fast. The best-case Idle battery life tops out at just over 14 hours, but even a more demanding test where we load four web pages every 60 seconds - including one page with three Flash ads - still ends up at nearly 10 hours using the IGP and stock CPU speed. What's more, you can run with Turbo33 and the G210M and still get over 6.5 hours of web surfing.

We've dropped the other video playback tests, mostly because they're all very similar to the x264 results. HD DivX will last about 10-15% longer, and lower resolution videos would also improve on the results, but in general you can expect 5 to 6 hours of video playback with the UL80Vt.

The relative battery life is the final element, putting things into perspective. The UL80Vt has a higher capacity battery, so getting more mobility is somewhat expected. In the lowest power mode (IGP + stock CPU) the UL80Vt can provide nearly seven minutes per Wh, which is just slightly less than the ASUS 1005HA netbook. Turn on Turbo33 and battery life drops by about 10%. Running stock with the G210M enabled on the other hand results in a drop of 46%. Internet surfing with Turbo33 + G210M doesn't really change compared to stock with G210M, with only a 1% drop. The results here are in a test that happens to be more demanding than our MacBook testing, so the stellar battery life is even more impressive. Is it any wonder we're impressed with the ASUS UL80Vt? You get awesome battery life with reasonable gaming and application performance, all for just $800.

ASUS UL80Vt Gaming Performance ASUS G51J Application Performance
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  • JarredWalton - Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - link

    I'm curious to see how it works as well. I'm thinking CULV + 9400M would have accomplished much the same thing, but perhaps not. Stay tuned....
  • yacoub - Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - link

    Here's hoping it comes with a quality display! ;)
  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 16, 2009 - link

    One word: NOPE!

    Okay, more than one word: When you boot up a laptop for the first time and the black background of the Windows loading screen looks more like dark gray, you know the contrast ratio is crap. Bleh.
  • Ditiris - Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - link

    I finally switched my HTPC over to Windows 7 and noticed that it had a mind of its own with regard to power settings.

    power settings, change plan settings, change advanced power settings, expand Sleep and Allow wake timers, Disable any that are there

    That fixed all my issues, even though I didn't have any sleep/wake timers, but disabling the ability seems to be important.

    I haven't had any issues with my Vista machines (FWIW I'm using High Performance and I specifically went into the Advanced screen and disabled all sleep options).
  • JarredWalton - Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - link

    The wake events are already disabled, unfortunately. Some laptops exhibit the problem less than others (driver related perhaps), but my best guess is that somewhere there's a rogue line of code that gets invoked on occasion. I've actually fooled around hacking the registry on my personal laptop in order to keep the problem from reoccurring, but that was neither fun nor recommended for the faint of heart!
  • mczak - Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - link

    Again I have to wonder what the point of the OC CULV chip is. There's a ~10W difference (at full cpu load) between OC and non-OC, which means it is almost certainly also overvolted, but more importantly, that difference is larger than the TDP difference between CULV parts and (slightly faster) LV parts.
    Looks to me like using a LV part instead of OC CULV would be both a bit faster plus actually offer slightly more battery life (unless, of course, you use stock setting of the CULV).
  • JarredWalton - Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - link

    It's pretty much giving users the ability to run with long battery life and when desired get better performance. If it were an on-the-fly setting, it would be a lot better. Anyway, even overclocked the SU7300 in the UL80Vt idles at what appears to be 2W, where something like the P8600 appears to idle at close to twice that (4-5W). It would be interesting to see some of the LV CPUs in a similar system, certainly... SL9600 anyone? Or maybe ASUS should grab an SL9380 and enable the same Turbo33 functionality. 1.8GHz stock and 2.4GHz overclocked. That would be the equivalent of P8600 (with 6MB cache) but hopefully allow lower power at idle.
  • kagey - Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - link

    BTW - Nice reviews!

    I may have missed this so slap me if I did but It would be helpful including some sort of standard about these two in the evaluation of a laptop. I feel these two points are just as important as performance and battery life.
    Both are subjective but should be able to be measured while web surfing, gaming, and full load.

    Noise factor of the fans. I hate it when you start doing something on the laptop and all of sudden the fans kick in and sound like a jet taking off. It would be nice if you could come up with some standards in the way of noise.

    Heat - the palm rest when typing, touchpad / mouse area, underneath i.e. (keeping your legs nice and warm - yeah I know not the most optimal position for a laptop), and exhaust areas.

    Thanks for listening.
  • JarredWalton - Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - link

    I didn't mention either, but I did think about them during the review process. For the record, the UL80Vt is very quiet and cool running. When the fans kick up to higher speeds, it still remains a lot quieter than most laptops... maybe around 37-40 dB max, and it doesn't happen unless you put a heavy load (100% CPU or running games) on the system.

    The G51J gets louder, but it's not as bad as the W870CU. For most tasks it will stay under ~35dB, but gaming will bump it up to around 39-41dB. Heat was not an issue on the G51J in my experience; the palm rest gets warm, perhaps up to 90F, and the bottom is the same except for the top-right corner (directly under the CPU/GPU "circle") which gets over 100F for sure.
  • Wesleyrpg - Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - link

    hey guys, love the asus g51j, had one for a few days myself!

    only problem is the mic on my one makes me sound like im in a subway (tried all the settings i could think of!).....have you guys had a chance to test your mic on livemessenger/ventrilo???

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