ASUS U41JF: Arrandale's Not Dead Yet
by Jarred Walton on March 28, 2011 7:35 PM ESTBattery Life: Capacity Triumphs
There’s simply no beating a higher capacity battery, all other areas being equal. I do find it a bit funny that ASUS has relabeled their battery to be 83Wh now instead of 84Wh; technically it’s still 83.52Wh based on the simple (V*Ah) equation, but then you’re likely going to get a lot less than 83Wh out of it after a few months of use when it’s no longer running at 100%. Anyway, I don’t have much to add here on battery wear levels, as for some reason HWMonitor didn’t pick up the information for this particular laptop.
Looking at the laptop market as a whole, Apple is able to squeeze some amazing battery life out of their laptops with OSX, but install Windows 7 on them and they become merely average. ASUS has been one of the best options for battery life on Windows laptops ever since the debut of their UL series in 2009, and with the U41JF you can now get nearly all of the battery life with improved graphics performance when you want it. Also note that we tested with SHE (i.e. underclocking) enabled; if you choose to run at stock speeds, you’ll get about 10% less battery life.
When you can last over ten hours for basic work, or 8.5 hours of constant Internet surfing, you know you’re doing pretty well. The U41JF actually surpasses the ULV-based UL80JT in two of the three battery life results (with H.264 favoring the UL80JT). Compared to the older U30JC (not shown, but you can see the results in Mobile Bench), it also wins in the Idle and Internet tests, and the H.264 result is a lot closer than the UL80JT. The UL80VT is still our battery life champion, posting over 14 hours in the Idle test, but performance is clearly slower than the latest U- and UL-series laptops.
In keeping with recent tradition, I also tested several other areas of battery life. For an 83Wh battery, the U41JF manages to recharge pretty quickly, taking just over three hours (192 minutes) to go from completely drained to 100% charge. Power draw measured 37-57W while charging, with higher power draw when the battery was closer to dead. If ASUS is like other manufacturers, they have some smarts in their batteries so that they don’t overcharge some cells (and cause them to wear out faster), which would explain the drop in power draw as maximum capacity approached.
Gaming battery life as always is a bit of a stretch. You can run the CPU/GPU pretty much at AC performance levels, but not for all that long. Looping 3DMark03, the battery lasted 145 minutes, which would correlate to a less demanding game. 3DMark06 hits the CPU/GPU more, and battery life drops down to just 102 minutes (think of games like Crysis, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Metro 2033, etc.) If you want to run the LCD at maximum brightness instead of 100 nits, we measured a rather high increase in power requirements of nearly 5W, so that’s one more item to consider. For most practical scenarios, though, the U41JF will provide an all-day computing experience with no need to find an outlet.
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lexluthermiester - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
As opposed to HP and AMD? Or was that sarcasm?ajp_anton - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link
Have you ever considered flipping that graph and make a simple "Watts (lower is better)" instead?sleepeeg3 - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link
Appreciate your comments on the LCD. I had an different Acer, which probably was not much different from the one in your graphs and tried to switch to the ASUS - horrible. While the Acer was no gem, the ASUS was almost intolerable. I ended up returning it, because of trackpad skipping and partly for the horrible LCD.That said, would I be willing to pay for an IPS panel in a cheap laptop that I am going to use and abuse? Especially one in an Acer with a chafing, integrated LCD power cable that is causing some of the LED backlights to fail, requiring replacement of the panel. Maybe $100 more if I knew it was an IPS, but it's not critical for something I do work on, when I can go home and type on the fantastic 26" IPS I am typing on now. It is amazing to sit behind someone with an Apple laptop and see their gorgeous screen, but on the other hand I know they paid $2000-3000 for that battery sucking, incompatible brick so it's alot easier to tolerate.
Bottom line though, it would be nice to have more choices and for there to be a clear standard for LCD display technology.
mschira - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
save another 100g by ditching the DVD drive,give us a better (highres screen) - you have a buy.
So. Yea well.
M.
duploxxx - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
While this is a nice update / upgrade if you want it is nothing more then stretching the life cycle of an EOL platform.By adding the GT425M, sure the performance is a better then the UM but the playback already shows what will happen with battery in real life not to mention any gaming on battery.
SB will clearly have the lead in poweroptimization for the CPU while still the need is there for a dGPU, the HD series are just not strong enough gaming wise.
Liano on the other hand will provide the gaming performance in the same 35W package.
Watch the P520+5650 real close that is the performance it will have but with a more optimised CPU, when AMD is able to get the idle power under controll of the whole package (mainly needed for idle and surfing), the platform will be a much more balanced solution, the right one for this kind of notebook offers.
Chris Peredun - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
"DVD-RAM (Matshita UJ892AS)"Really? A DVD-RAM drive? Haven't seen one of those in years. ;)
Methinks you meant "DVDRW" instead.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
DVD-RAM is another standard, and that's the way the drive chose to identify itself. Technically, every DVD-RAM capable drive is also able to support DVD+/-RW as well, but I suppose just keeping the model number in there is sufficient.Chris Peredun - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
DVD-RAM isn't used very often these days, that's why I suggested the change to the more common "DVDRW" - but mea culpa, apparently this drive can in fact read *and* write to DVD-RAMs.geniekid - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
I'm still using my UL80VT from 1.5 years ago. When I'm away from home, I still use it to play semi-old-school games like TF2 and Torchlight. The battery life is amazing if you mode down to integrated graphics and watch movies or surf the internet. If the U41JF is two refreshes away from the UL80VT and still offers the same battery life for about the same price (I bought my UL80VT for $850) with the ability to run modern games, I have no problem recommending it to anyone who's on the fence.Alexo - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
Are there any (current or upcoming) laptops that combine a good screen with long battery life?I understand that the Tnikpad X220 is available with an IPS panel (although it has a rather small screen and no discrete graphics).
Are there other options?