Gateway and Acer Netbooks: Wonder Twin Powers, Activate!
by Vivek Gowri on April 28, 2010 2:22 AM ESTBattery Life
Pine Trail was a huge boon for battery life in netbooks, with 8 hours being the minimum for runtime on a netbook with a 6-cell battery. Both of the netbooks here have 6-cell 5600 mAh batteries and offer great battery life as expected. Under web-browsing and other processing-light tasks, you can expect 8 hours of runtime, slightly longer than the 1001P (which has a slightly smaller battery). The absolute maximum battery life under ideal conditions is around 11 hours, and HD video battery life is somewhere between 5 and 7 hours, depending on the type of video being played.
Battery life is in line with other similar laptops, though it's interesting that the Acer/Gateway "62Wh" batteries are only able to equal the ASUS 1001P "48Wh" battery. We don't know if the ASUS laptops are truly more energy efficient (probably) or if Acer is just a bit more lenient in battery capacity ratings. It doesn't really matter much either way, as you get whatever battery the manufacturer provides, but it is interesting to see the difference in relative battery life considering all other areas are essentially the same. The different HDD and LCD panel likely account for the small battery life advantage of the Acer 532h over the Gateway LT2120u.
The 6-cell battery sticks out of the bottom of the systems by roughly a half inch, which seems to be an increasingly popular way of doing extended batteries (the ThinkPad Edge has the battery protruding from the bottom as well). I'm not a fan of this type of battery, since it adds thickness, but some people prefer batteries like this for the incline it gives the keyboard.
Another oddity is the bundled AC adapter included with both systems. Unlike most laptops, the adapter is a wall wart instead of in a power brick. While this keeps the cord itself clean, it’s a cumbersome way to make a power adapter. You end up occupying adjacent outlets on power strips or wall sockets at times. I’d much rather see a long cord with a small power brick in the middle like the AS1410 or Eee 1001P.
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JarredWalton - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
I've got a couple AMD-based laptop reviews in the works. Vivek will be getting the Acer Ferrari One this week (CULV alternative), and I've got M300 and M600 laptops to compare with an i3-430m setup. Honestly, other than a lower price AMD laptops are still a tough sell in my book. The better IGP still isn't that great; the Intel HD i3/i5 IGP is good enough for anything but gaming, while the HD 4200 needs low detail and 800x600 resolution to be playable in most titles. Couple that with generally lower performance and battery life and there's not a lot of benefit.CULV with a discrete GPU can give you better battery life and gaming performance if that's what you're after, though it will cost (a lot) more. At that point, the CULV + Optimus laptops end up being the best recommendation. So the choice is pretty much 8 hours battery life with 4500MHD (Intel CULV) or 4 hours battery life with HD 4200 (AMD), for around $400-$600.
jaydee - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
But I think the ASUS Eee PC 1201T w/AMD mv-40 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... could give the traditional Atom-based netbook a good run for it's money.About $60 more and you get 12" screen, 1366x768 resolution, 2GB of RAM, HDMI out, stronger CPU and much stronger integrated graphics. You lose on battery life, and doesn't come with an OS, but for people with extra WinXP licenses or wanting to put Linux on it, I think it provides a much stronger value than the above Acer/Gateway twins, don't you think?
How would it compare to Atom+Ion? It'll still be cheaper, but should even out the battery life.
hybrid2d4x4 - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
Hey, I just wanted to throw out a suggestion for the firefox sqlite issue: install a RAMdrive app (I use Dataram RAMDisk - it's free and works flawlessly, even with win7 x64) and move your profile to the RAM drive. I did this on my HTPC as this is something that has been nagging me with a WD Green drive where the drive would noticeably lag when the head is unloaded and I start typing into the address bar. The time to generate "suggestions" as you type is now instantaneous! You can configure it to load the image on startup and save it on shutdown, so it works exactly like normal, but the only time it accesses the HDD is on startup/shutdown. It also saves you the wear of the very frequent unnecessary random writes to the HDD every time you load a page or reads when it fills in what you type.Having said that, I would also like to see how SSDs would fare in laptops, and in addition to your suggestions, I hope that Anand would also throw a typical 2.5" HDD into the SSD power charts as a reference for those of us considering SSD swaps into laptops.
m4nm4n - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
If I had these connected to my Wifi router, the router would be named Gleek.popej - Thursday, June 24, 2010 - link
You wrote: "we don't know if the ASUS laptops are truly more energy efficient".You probably use ASUS Super Hybrid Engine in auto mode. When running on battery SHE cripple notebook performance. CPU and RAM frequency is reduced by 20% and battery life is longer.
I think it is a flaw in your test, that you don't check performance when on battery.