Battery Life
In the past, our standard battery life test has been provided courtesy of MobileMark 2005. Since the laptop isn't available with Windows XP (and we didn't have the necessary SATA drivers to even attempt installing XP), we decided to look elsewhere to determine battery life. Generally speaking, we don't expect people to seriously tax their laptops when they are unplugged, so we tried to come up with a benchmark that would simulate moderate office application use. The other most common battery life test is simply DVD playback, so we looked at that using Star Wars Return of the Jedi as our test DVD. (Don't complain -- it's a 2.5 hour movie so we didn't have to loop it more than once!)
For the other battery test, we ended up settling on Internet Explorer and simulated web surfing. We created a script that would start Internet Explorer and load our three home pages, all of which contained quite a few Flash-based advertisements. The script would then sleep for 60 seconds, simulating "reading" the web pages, and then it exits Internet Explorer and repeats the process. Internet Explorer was set to delete all temp files on exit, so it still creates a bit of hard drive activity. Basically, this test corresponds to about the best case scenario you are likely to encounter, while the DVD test is a bit more taxing.
Since we don't have similar results for the other laptops, we'll just report the two scores for each test in a table. It's not too surprising that the double capacity battery pretty much doubles battery life.
HP also offers a high-capacity 6-cell battery that should improve performance without adding all of the extra bulk of the 12-cell battery, but we didn't receive that battery and we're not quite sure how much more power that battery holds relative to the standard 6-cell. As it stands, the laptop either offers a somewhat limited amount of battery life, or if you get the larger battery you can end up with a pretty good mobile experience. Ideally, we would like to see minimum two hours of battery life, and probably closer to 2.5 hours as that's enough to watch just about any full-length movie on a single charge. Considering the performance isn't particularly stellar, we were hoping that battery life would be better.
Power Consumption
Related to the battery life discussions we've just finished, we have power results. For power testing, we removed the battery from the laptops and measured system power draw at the wall outlet using a Kill-A-Watt device. All laptops were configured to run at maximum performance when plugged into AC power. We tested several different scenarios to try to isolate the power draw of the various components. First, we have the baseline measurement when the system is idle and sitting at the desktop. No applications are running for 10 minutes or more and the screensaver and hard drive sleep mode are disabled. As a CPU load test, we run two instances of Folding@Home at 100%. Finally, for maximum power load we leave the two folding instances running and start 3DMark05. In this way, we can see roughly how much power the GPU is using in 3D mode versus 2D mode.
Looking at the power requirements of the system, the somewhat disappointing battery life is at least partially explained. At idle, power requirements aren't bad at all, but when the CPU is under load the power of requirements are quite a bit higher. We also noticed that the CPU had a tendency to not kick into the lowest power states; we discovered this using CPU-Z and the processor almost always stayed in the 8x configuration at idle, only bouncing up to 10x when one of the cores was placed under load. Normally, at idle, we're used to seeing the CPU dropping to the minimum power state -- in this case 1.0 GHz. It could be that the slight load that CPU-Z put on the system was preventing this from happening, but it also seems that Windows Vista was impacting the situation. Compared to the ASUS A8Js, the larger screen, hard drive, and faster front side bus all seem to balance out and result in a system that consumes only a bit less power at idle and quite a bit more power at load.
In the past, our standard battery life test has been provided courtesy of MobileMark 2005. Since the laptop isn't available with Windows XP (and we didn't have the necessary SATA drivers to even attempt installing XP), we decided to look elsewhere to determine battery life. Generally speaking, we don't expect people to seriously tax their laptops when they are unplugged, so we tried to come up with a benchmark that would simulate moderate office application use. The other most common battery life test is simply DVD playback, so we looked at that using Star Wars Return of the Jedi as our test DVD. (Don't complain -- it's a 2.5 hour movie so we didn't have to loop it more than once!)
For the other battery test, we ended up settling on Internet Explorer and simulated web surfing. We created a script that would start Internet Explorer and load our three home pages, all of which contained quite a few Flash-based advertisements. The script would then sleep for 60 seconds, simulating "reading" the web pages, and then it exits Internet Explorer and repeats the process. Internet Explorer was set to delete all temp files on exit, so it still creates a bit of hard drive activity. Basically, this test corresponds to about the best case scenario you are likely to encounter, while the DVD test is a bit more taxing.
Since we don't have similar results for the other laptops, we'll just report the two scores for each test in a table. It's not too surprising that the double capacity battery pretty much doubles battery life.
| Batter Life (Minutes) | ||
| HP dv6500t 6-cell | HP dv6500t 12-cell | |
| Internet Explorer | 133 | 246 |
| DVD Playback | 105 | 205 |
HP also offers a high-capacity 6-cell battery that should improve performance without adding all of the extra bulk of the 12-cell battery, but we didn't receive that battery and we're not quite sure how much more power that battery holds relative to the standard 6-cell. As it stands, the laptop either offers a somewhat limited amount of battery life, or if you get the larger battery you can end up with a pretty good mobile experience. Ideally, we would like to see minimum two hours of battery life, and probably closer to 2.5 hours as that's enough to watch just about any full-length movie on a single charge. Considering the performance isn't particularly stellar, we were hoping that battery life would be better.
Power Consumption
Related to the battery life discussions we've just finished, we have power results. For power testing, we removed the battery from the laptops and measured system power draw at the wall outlet using a Kill-A-Watt device. All laptops were configured to run at maximum performance when plugged into AC power. We tested several different scenarios to try to isolate the power draw of the various components. First, we have the baseline measurement when the system is idle and sitting at the desktop. No applications are running for 10 minutes or more and the screensaver and hard drive sleep mode are disabled. As a CPU load test, we run two instances of Folding@Home at 100%. Finally, for maximum power load we leave the two folding instances running and start 3DMark05. In this way, we can see roughly how much power the GPU is using in 3D mode versus 2D mode.
| System Power Draw (Watts) | ||||
| ABS Mayhem Z5 | ASUS A8JS | ASUS G2P | HP dv6500t | |
| Idle | 44-49 | 26-32 | 43-52 | 22 |
| 100% CPU | 67-71 | 47-52 | 71-81 | 57 |
| Maximum | 100 | 71 | 97 | 67 |
Looking at the power requirements of the system, the somewhat disappointing battery life is at least partially explained. At idle, power requirements aren't bad at all, but when the CPU is under load the power of requirements are quite a bit higher. We also noticed that the CPU had a tendency to not kick into the lowest power states; we discovered this using CPU-Z and the processor almost always stayed in the 8x configuration at idle, only bouncing up to 10x when one of the cores was placed under load. Normally, at idle, we're used to seeing the CPU dropping to the minimum power state -- in this case 1.0 GHz. It could be that the slight load that CPU-Z put on the system was preventing this from happening, but it also seems that Windows Vista was impacting the situation. Compared to the ASUS A8Js, the larger screen, hard drive, and faster front side bus all seem to balance out and result in a system that consumes only a bit less power at idle and quite a bit more power at load.
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Procurion - Sunday, June 24, 2007 - link
Having bought a Sager after a LOT of research(and an RMA'd Ferrari-Acer, lol, not the car) I question the quest for extreme resolution. My laptop has a native 1900x1200 screen which I consider unuseable on a 17" screen....1024x768 puts a LOT of info on screens and I wonder why the preoccupation with "ultra resolution"? If this is a casual use/business use type of laptop, those high rez settings aren't necessary at all. Either that or my 40-something bespectacled eyes just ain't cuttin' it anymore...:)strikeback03 - Monday, June 25, 2007 - link
Personally, I consider 1024x768 the bare minimum - I can't fit as much on the screen as I like. My Thinkpad has a 1400x1050 15" screen that I consider about perfect. As mentioned, the good thing is that both 1024x768 and 1600x1200 are available in the same screen size.On a side note, Lenovo still has T60s with Flexview IPS screens - we just bought one for work. They might not want to send one out for review though as word has it that the T61 will not be available with Flexview and will be hard to get with a 4:3 ration screen at all.
JarredWalton - Sunday, June 24, 2007 - link
I don't have a huge problem with the resolution - it's *okay* - but it would be nice to have options. Regardless, the quality of the display is not at all good compared to a lot of other recent laptops. Ideally, users should be able to choose from more than one screen config, but that's often limited to more expensive notebook models. Running Windows Vista, I feel 1280x800 is cramped, 1440x900 is passable, and 1680x1050 given enough room to make me happy. Then again, I run a 30" desktop LCD at 2560x1600.... :)Procurion - Monday, June 25, 2007 - link
Point taken about the need for some options rather than "one size fits all"-as a matter of fact my post was inspired because my needs/resolutions are different than, say, yours. As you and several other authors here have pointed out in the past, for the costs involved it is beyond me why the manufacturers put some really awful screens out there on their laptops....After opening a laptop up and booting it, what is the first thing that makes an impression? And you have to look at it every time you use the damn thing? LOL...legoman666 - Saturday, June 23, 2007 - link
You know... you could get rid of all the problems with your benchmarking programs not working on Vista by simply uninstalling it and installing Windows XP instead. My sister (not a big computer person) just bought a new laptop. The FIRST thing she and I did when it arrived was uninstall Vista and put XP on it.JarredWalton - Saturday, June 23, 2007 - link
Which requires finding drivers for the chipset and slipstreaming them onto an XP CD. There's no floppy drive with this laptop. Anyway, like it or not, 95% of new PCs are going to be coming with Vista installed most likely, and I would say the number of people that plan on wiping the drive and installing XP instead is going to be very limited.legoman666 - Sunday, June 24, 2007 - link
What do you mean you'd have to slipstream the chipset drivers into the windows installation? I've isntalled windows countless times on many different machines and I have never had to do such a thing. I just isntall windows normally, then once it's installed, I install all the drivers. It really isn't difficult... Nor would you need a floppy drive unless you plan on installing windows onto a RAID array. I don't mean to sound rude or anything, but neither of those arguments are really valid. Although, the bit about people not uninstalling Vista in favor of XP is probably true...JarredWalton - Sunday, June 24, 2007 - link
I booted up off of the XP CD (see, I really did try to install XP), but because the hard drive is SATA XP apparently wasn't able to see it. I got the dreaded "No hard drives detected" error message, and that was pretty much it for my XP attempt.See, the BIOS lacks any options to set/change the SATA mode and so it appears to be running as an AHCI SATA drive. That setting generally requires drivers on a floppy in order to work (in my experience). HP isn't selling the laptop with XP, and they don't intend to support such a configuration. That being the case, why spend time trying to work around a limitation in order to test something most people aren't planning on using?
If you want a laptop with XP, you'd be far better off purchasing a laptop that comes that way. There are still plenty of those available.
NoGodForMe - Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - link
Jarred is correct about slip streaming the drivers to boot XP. I have created a guide with step by step instructions to installing XP on the DV6500T. I can run XP or Vista. This laptop is a good all around performer. Not the fastest, but does everything needed and is really great with XP on it. I installed Tribes2 and UT2K4 and I've got the integrated X3100, plays both of them great.Here's my guide. This would be a good idea for the Macbook Pro, or the Asus G1S.
http://www.nogodforme.com/HPDV6500T.htm">http://www.nogodforme.com/HPDV6500T.htm
The key to my guide is that it's step by step with links to all drivers. Would be nice if someone did this for VMWare player, parallels, and bootcamp.
Vidmar - Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - link
Jarred,I just purchased a number of Gateway 155C convertibles (tablet pc) for my office. As you said XP won't install because of the lack of an appropriate SATA driver. But it's so easy to slipstream these SATA drivers into your XP build using nLite. I had a working XP install CD in less than 10 mins!
In any case as other have said a look at lower weight laptops and tablet PCs would be nice to see. Take a close look at the Gateway 155C; it's a very good design.