I’ll be running a Battery Eater Pro test later today, but I wanted to provide some general battery drain observations on the Samsung Q1 Ultra Premium. I installed Notebook Hardware Control to get a feel for things and see some interesting data. During the observation, I had the brightness at 50%, WiFi on, Bluetooth off and used the "Normal" profile in the Samsung Battery Manager power settings.
By and large the 1.33 GHz Intel Core Solo runs at 800 MHz when it can. If it doesn’t need to, it won’t run at 1.33GHz, which keeps the power consumption of the CPU down. When "idling", meaning the machine is just sitting there doing pretty much nothing, the power draw averages around 6 Watts. For basic web surfing, I saw the drain hop up in to the 8 to 10 Watt drain. When stressed with a high CPU load, it looks like a 12 to 13 Watt draw.
Now there’s many ways to "stress" the device out for these tests, but I’m trying to keep it simple. We can debate the approach but I wanted to do a quick-and-dirty set of observations for you. And for Steve, who’s sending me note after note looking for this type of information. Hey, I can’t blame him as he’s publicly becoming enamored with this device. ;)
As I said, just sitting around, the device is pulling around 6 Watts. It varies as background processes kick in of course, but ranges between 5.5 and 7.5 Watts. Don’t get hung up on the 58 Watt/hour rating of the 6-cell battery at this point. Meaning: don’t conclude you can get nearly 10 hours of battery life with the 6 Watt draw. Theoretically, you could, but if your UMPC is idle for 10 hours, why have it powered on? (Reminds of the "if a tree falls in the forest bit…)
Firing up Internet Explorer and doing some web work resulted in the CPU staying in the 800 MHz zone for a majority of the time. No surprise there. The power draw was around 9 Watts or so during this time, so a little math shows us that you could probably surf on the Q1UP for 6 to 6.5 hours or so. That’s assuming you don’t do anything else, have a fully charged battery with very little wear, etc… call it a best case, out of the box situation.
Now what about a little stress? I opened up Microsoft Word 2007 and did a little inking. A wee bit more of a CPU spike, but not much. So I fired up a 720p WMVHD video in full screen. Now we’re getting somewhere! The CPU load was averaging around 70% during playback and the device was using the full 1.33 GHz clock cycle more often than not. Average battery drain was around 12 Watts… a few spikes higher, but only up to 13.2 Watts. Using the 12 Watt figure, you’re still near 5-hours of battery life if you just sat and watched video playback. If I was going to do that, I’d likely shut down all other apps and turn my WiFi radio off to save a little bit of juice.
This should give you a bit of an idea on the power consumption. Again, many ways to do these types of test, but I wanted to share some preliminary information. The Battery Pro torture test I run will tell us the minimum run-time you should expect and I’ll have that info later today or tomorrow since it takes hours to run that.
I’m finding that this device offers a very acceptable compromise between performance and run-time. I’ve got excellent CPU power and responsiveness when needed but can still work for 5 or 6 hours. No doubt the 6-cell battery has much to do with that; with a 3-cell, I’d still have the horsepower, but only have it for 2.5 to 3 hours. Speaking of the battery, my second 6-cell should be arriving any day. I’ll be rotating the batteries to keep the wear level even. When out and about, I should easily have 10 – 12 hours of computing time. If I need more than that, someone call an ambulance because I’m likely sleep and food deprived!
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