Gigabyte Booktop M1022: Merging Netbooks and Nettops

Netbook Power Requirements

As a corollary to the battery life tests, we also performed measurements of power requirements using the AC adapters and a Kill-A-Watt device. These numbers are only accurate to the nearest Watt, so a difference of 1W (i.e. from rounding) could obscure up to a 12% actual difference in power requirements. Also note that power requirements change when you switch to DC power, so the battery life tests are a better indication of a true power requirements. Still, it's interesting to see just how little power these notebooks consume relative to entry-level laptops -- let alone your typical gaming desktop.

In most of the test cases, the M1022 ends up using a couple Watts more than the 1005HA. Since we run our battery life tests at 100 nits, there's still something else going on when we switch to DC power that the above charts don't show. As mentioned, the 1005HA averages 8.6W in the Internet Battery test compared to 11.1W for the M1022, where percentagewise the M1022 uses 29% more power. When we switch to AC power, it looks like the M1022 only uses 5~20% more power -- and that's with the ASUS Super Hybrid Engine disabled. There's obviously some room for Gigabyte to optimize power requirements further.