ASUS U41JF: Arrandale's Not Dead Yet

Battery 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.