AVADirect's Clevo B5130M: GeForce GT 425M with a 15.6" 1080p Chaser

Battery Life

Given that Clevo notebooks are usually big, power-hungry machines, it's interesting to get to play around with a unit that keeps a battery for more than use as a glorified UPS. The 62Whr battery that comes with the B5130M is actually at least fairly generous compared to the dismal 48Whr batteries that are so common in budget machines, and hopefully leveraging the Optimus-powered NVIDIA GeForce GT 425M will help to pick up some of the slack.

Unfortunately, the B5130M places pretty consistently at the bottom of the heap and pulls some of the worst relative battery life numbers. It's still able to last for more than three hours surfing the internet, which I'd really consider the bare minimum at this point, but beyond that seems to be too much. Only when you leave the system completely idle are you able to get more than four hours of useful battery life out of it. The similar Dell XPS 15 has a smaller battery yet manages better battery life in every test, likely helped by additional attention to power saving features.

As for noise and heat, the fan could probably help explain why the unit has such a hard time producing decent battery life. It spins constantly, even in power saver mode on the battery, with a fairly low "aaaahhh" kind of hum. (I know that's a very scientific description; we aim to please.) When you start really pushing the system, the fan gets louder. It's never horribly obtrusive, though, and we've had much worse on the test bench before.

The good news is that there's a reason why that fan is always running: the B5130M is tuned for heat rather than silence or battery life, and as a result the components all stay pretty frosty. A peak temperature of 72C on the GPU is frankly outstanding, while the peak processor core temperatures during an hour long loop of 3DMark06 never hit 80C (though they do get close.) If nothing else, this notebook stays very cool. As Martha Stewart would say, that's pretty sweet.