Asus U33Jc: Much Ado About Bamboo

ASUS U33Jc - Battery Life

With the U30Jc, we found that the combination of a huge 84Wh battery and NVIDIA Optimus resulted in massive battery lifetime. With the same 84 Wh battery and a lower clocked graphics card, the U33Jc delivers battery life that's even more awesome. At idle, you can pull nearly 10 hours of battery life out of it. That’s with a dedicated graphics card and a full voltage processor. Granted, at idle, the graphics card turns off and gives way to the onboard Intel HD Graphics IGP, but it’s nice to be able to have the dedicated graphics and the battery life.

For a more realistic mobile usage scenario, we turn to our internet benchmark, which provides a decent estimate as to what kind of battery life you can expect when actually using the system. The U33 hit more than 7.5 hours of runtime in the internet test, which lines up with the kind of battery life we observed in unscientific field testing. If you’re just running a web browser and basic office productivity tools, you can expect around 8 hours of use before you need to plug it in.

The Core i3, while capable of giving decent battery life, is still far more power hungry than both generations of the CULV platform, so in our CPU-intensive HD video playback test, the U33 naturally suffers in comparison to other thin and lights running CULV. However, due to the huge battery, it’s still competitive and pulls over four hours - good for almost two high-bitrate 720p HD movies encoded in the x264 video codec. Lower bitrate and lower resolution videos will naturally use less power.

Overall, it’s nice to see ASUS consistently deliver portable systems with very strong battery life. I have been following ASUS notebooks long enough to know that it was not always so, and battery life would usually be the first thing to be sacrificed on the alter of performance, even on a 13” notebook.