Toshiba A505D-S6987: A Look at Turion II Ultra M600 Performance

Toshiba A505D-S6987 Battery Life

Speaking of battery life, we come to what's traditionally been the Achilles' heel of AMD-based notebooks. Though Toshiba opts to equip the A505D-S6987 with a six-cell battery, it's a low capacity 44Wh unit, and that battery also has to drive the power-hungry Turion II Ultra and a 16” screen. The capacity is typical of many 15.6" and 16.0" notebooks, but there are other laptops with 63Wh 6-cell batteries, which would mean around 43% more battery life. For our battery tests we set the computer's power profile to “Power Saver” in Windows 7 and screen brightness measured as close to 100 nits as we possible.

And there it is. The combination of a relatively low capacity battery and AMD's Turion II Ultra doesn't deliver very good battery life. Toshiba includes an “Eco mode” that could theoretically improve the situation, but you can't customize the power options in Eco mode (the LCD always shuts off after 1 minute) so we couldn't test it in the same manner as our other tests. As it stands, the A505D-S6987 has some of the worst battery life we've tested. In real world usage, you can expect to top out at about two, maybe two-and-a-half hours of useful battery life before the system goes into standby. AMD may have closed the performance gap, but power consumption is still a very real issue with the M600.

The Tigris dual-core processors are all rated at 35W power use, while the new Danube P-series parts cut that figure down to 25W. Depending on how much AMD has cut idle power use, we could see a fairly significant boost to battery life with the Turion II P520 (2.3GHz). AMD also has the tri-core P820 (1.8GHz) and quad-core P920 (1.6GHz) rated at 25W. We've got another Toshiba with the P920 arriving this week, so we'll be looking at the latest AMD platform shortly and hope to see at least a 15% boost in battery life.