Samsung Series 7 NP700Z7C Review
by Jarred Walton on August 16, 2012 2:05 AM ESTSamsung Series 7 Battery Life
Samsung is using an 8-cell, ~80Wh integrated battery in the 17.3” Series 7, and similar to Dell’s XPS 15 and the MacBook Pro 15 it’s not user replaceable. We calibrated the LCD to 50% 100 nits (43% brightness, or three steps down from max) for our battery testing. Here are the results for our standardized battery life testing.
It’s not too surprising to see the Series 7 perform very well, given the high capacity battery. Maximum battery life is just over seven hours, Internet battery life is six hours, and H.264 playback lasts 4.5 hours. We’ve noted in the past that laptops with higher resolution displays do worse in our video playback test, and that’s the case here as well—there are more pixels to calculate and update every frame of the video. While that means lower resolution displays win out in this test, we’d much rather have the higher resolution display.
Looking at the big picture (literally), battery life is generally ahead of everything except for Ultrabooks/ultraportables and AMD’s Trinity, which should be sufficient for most users. Of course, normalized battery life shows that the larger LCD is definitely taking its toll, as the Series 7 drops into the bottom four of the charts. Even so, it’s still the best result we’ve seen from a retail 17.3”-screen notebook.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
50 Comments
View All Comments
Darkstone - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
You can ctrl-c ctrl-v a chart from excel into mspaint ;).JarredWalton - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
You get an extra 1px border around the graph doing that, which isn't terrible I suppose. (As a side note, older versions of Photoshop/Office *sucked* if you tried the Copy/Paste trick, which is why I got in the habit of doing the screenshot, paste, crop). I still need to upload and put it into the CMS, though, which is honestly the more painful part.MadMan007 - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
No problemo, it's a great review and details like the 'real speeds' as affected by thermals are very important. Seems like we are moving toward form over function in the pursuit of thinness.DanNeely - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
The LCD page has a gallery for the Lenovo M92 desktop pc.JarredWalton - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
Weird. I guess there was a glitch in the gallery engine, because I know I created the LCD gallery! Dustin must have done his gallery at the same time and somehow it overwrote my LCD images. :-( Anyway, thanks for the heads up; the gallery has been recreated.nerd1 - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
In the article you suggests retina MBP is way better in cooling, but it actually is not. Some german benchmark sites (including notebookcheck) reports exactly same throttling issue when they load CPU and GPU at the same time. (GPU running fine but CPU throttles down to 1.2Ghz, AND core temp exceeding 100 degree Celcius)Practically it is perfectly fine as most 3D games are bottlenecked by GPU performance, but you should update your article. I think thin laptops just cannot cool enough.
JarredWalton - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
I guess I didn't make that entirely clear; I mention the $2100 rMBP as an example of a more expensive laptop (with a better display and materials) that still has potential thermal issues. I've updated the paragraph to better reflect my intention. Pretty much you can't get thin, fast, quiet, and affordable -- and in many cases, you can't even get three of those items without a bit of compromise.tipoo - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
I can't find much reference to it throttling online , and Anandtechs own review points out how much better it is than the old models at that.http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-mac...
I'm curious how the non-retina current 15" model is.
JarredWalton - Friday, August 17, 2012 - link
The fact that performance drops by 5% running just a game over time suggests there's at least some throttling taking place. Push the CPU to 100% while playing a game (e.g. by running Cinebench on three of the CPU cores) and we should see a greater drop. I'm going to ping Anand and see if he can run that stress test, just to confirm/deny the potential for throttling.tipoo - Saturday, August 25, 2012 - link
I appreciate that, a quick article on whether both new Macbooks throttle would be interesting. Seems like a wider problem than I expected.I wonder of a small drop like 5% could just be lack of thermal headroom to turbo to the highest frequencies?