ASUS U30Jc: Refining Thin and Light Performance
by Jarred Walton on May 18, 2010 11:23 PM ESTASUS U30Jc Battery Life
ASUS has lately put a larger focus on battery life, and in the case of the U30Jc they easily eclipse the competition by including an 8-cell, 84Wh battery instead of the typical 6-cell units we see. ASUS also has their Power4Gear utility that lets you tune battery powered features, including the ability to shut off power to the optical drive, webcam, and WiFi adapter. We disabled all of those devices as appropriate for our battery life testing (i.e. we left WiFi enabled on the Internet test and disabled on the other two), and it looks like it helps the U30Jc provide a bit more mobility relative to other i3/i5 laptops. We set the LCD at ~100nits brightness, which is 47% on the U30Jc (seven steps down from maximum brightness if you're using the Fn+F5 keyboard shortcut).
Like the HP 5310m review, we have also included idle and Internet battery life results with the standard laptop build in place—i.e. without uninstalling all of the bloatware. ASUS pre-installed Trend Micro Internet Security (a 60-day trial), so you'll see these results in the charts below. Idle battery life doesn't take much of a hit, which is what we expect since the system shouldn't be doing anything (though we didn't see this when testing the HP with McAfee). Internet battery life on the other hand drops quite a bit, again in line with what we'd expect: the Trend Micro firewall needs to do some extra work if you're surfing the Internet. Naturally, if you choose to run without any sort of protection, you assume a risk. Casual users that don't know how to "surf safe" may need to bite the bullet and take a battery life hit.
Considering the amount of performance packed into the U30Jc, the battery life is very respectable. In the "clean" state (which is how we tested all of the other laptops), maximum battery life is just over nine hours and Internet battery life is eight hours. Compared with the other i3/i5 laptops we've tested, the U30Jc is far ahead and even manages to beat out quite a few of the CULV laptops. Granted, that's largely due to the 8-cell battery, but in our relative battery life metric we still see a large lead over the other i3/i5 systems. Battery life during x264 playback (using Media Player Classic: Home Cinema and running on the Intel HD Graphics) we still get over four hours of battery life. It's interesting to note that the x264 test is the one result where the Lenovo T410 with a 9-cell battery is able to match the U30Jc.
With Trend Micro Internet Security enabled, battery life at idle drops about 3%—nothing too serious. Internet battery life in contrast drops 21%. Again, this is pretty much what we expected to see. Anyone who has used a system that's protected with anti-virus and internet security software can attest to the difference it makes in performance. That said, Trend Micro does appear to beat McAfee in light usage situations (McAfee caused a 35% drop in idle battery life on the HP 5310m), though we're not testing on the same hardware so we can't say for certain how the two compare. Stay tuned for more investigations in this area….
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
57 Comments
View All Comments
zac206 - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
This laptop seems interesting. I would wonder how the MSI X360 would do against it, as it seems to have similar specs.GullLars - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
A good review here, seems like a decent laptop for some uses.I would love to see how it does if you swap the HDD for a SSD.
Jarred, If you still have the U30Jc in house an Intel SSD (or SandForce), would you consider swapping the drive and repeating the test suite? It would be much appreciated.
Doing so would likely increase productivity noticably, and increase typical battrey life through the "hurry up and go idle" principle.
A $100-200 SSD like x25-V/M would likely double (or more?) the PCmark Vantage total score, putting it firmly in the lead ahead of the Lenovo T410, with a good lead, possibly even in first place with double the score of second place.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
Does it need to be an Intel SSD? Because I have a Vertex I can slap in there if that's okay....GullLars - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
Sure, go ahead and put in the vertex. Remember to set AHCI mode.It will give a bit lower scores, but should still give a decent points boost.
Looking forward to it.
Will you post it as an extension/edit to the article, or maybe a new short one?
JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
I'll post it as a separate follow-up I think, as it's going to take a few days to rerun some of these tests.Kegetys - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
Too bad they didn't improve the screen at all, I have an UL30VT and the machine is fantastic except the poor quality display ruins it. Very bad viewing angles, poor contrast and entirely useless outdoors. The machine could also fit a 16:10 screen fine (huge bezels on top and bottom) and the added vertical space would be welcomed for desktop use. You wont enjoy movies with the screen anyway so 16:9 has very little use in my opinion.teohhanhui - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
The glossy screen is a major deal breaker for me :(Looking at Dell Vostro 3300/3400 instead.
Modeverything - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
I was just curious as to why a few of the laptops change between benchmarks? Doesn't this make some of the testing inconsistent?JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
I'm guessing you're referring to the previously missing Studio XPS 16 and Acer 5740G results on the application and 3DMark pages. Sorry about that. I added them in as they somehow got left off my spreadsheet. Mea culpa. If there are any others missing, let me know.blyndy - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
What about the Dell Vostro 3300?(http://www.dell.com/content/topics/topic.aspx/us/s...
Same size, same RAM/GPU, better cpu (i5-520M), 500 GB HDD, bluetooth. No HDMI (it's available on the 14", 15" and 17" models) and ships with only a 4-cell battert (an 8-cell is available), but it picks up eSATA and express-card, fingerprint reader and double mouse trackpad buttons (and it looks ten times better!) for $933.
I think that its miles ahead for the money, and the 17" model has the option for a GT 330M (although the 17" display show an unnerving amount of flex in this video at 44 secs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2HW0yMzbG8)
These Dells 3x00's are 8/10, they would be a 9/10 if the screens where matte, and the 17" would be a 10/10 if it offered a GTS 350M with GDDR5 :)
It would be great if Anandtech could do a review of one of them.