Best R2 config for max battery life

I am putting in my order for an R2 and want to set it up to get the best battery life possible even if it means cutting back on performance. I don't plan this as a desktop replacement so I don't mind playing older games on the go, but having the extra breathing room when I want it will be nice. I plan to go with the i5, as well as I am going to cough up the cash for the SSD. Any other suggestions for what I can do in the base config to maximize the battery?

2 or 3 gigs of memory?
My brain is locked in the mindset that I should go with 4 gigs for numerous reasons, but would cutting back the memory to 2-3 give me any benefit in battery life? Does Win7 even perform decently on only 2-3? If there is any benefit I have also considered getting the 4 and pulling out one of the dimms while on the road and unplugged a lot, and putting it back in when I know I'll be around a plug a lot.


And once I get the machine I have considered...

Under clocking the i5?
As I said I don't mind cutting back performance a bit if it means an extra 15 or so mins of battery. (You may wonder if I am willing to under clock why not just go with the R1. I'd still like the extra bit of power when plugged in.) Does TB scale well enough that this isn't too much of an issue?

LED Lights?
If in a dark room having the backlit keyboard on will be very nice, but otherwise I don't mind turning all of them off. Would this give any significance to battery life?

Any other suggestions or ideas would be awesome.

 

if you are gonna do it go with i7 if i am not mistaken TDP of both i5 and i7 is 18w. Now that is at full load and you will have a higher chance of hitting full load on the i5 versus i7. So the i7 will run at lower wattage since it will not be running at capacity as high as the i5. Also you can not replace the cpu in the future so you might as well upgrade the cpu now. The ram get the 4gb options it is worth it for the price they charge and you can always pull one stick out but in my opinion the 4gb is sweet spot and will help your computer so you do not run out of memory and start to use the HD for pagefile which will slow it down and use more battery. Get the ssd if you can afford it and you will be happy with battery life and speed.

Led backlight have all zones turned off and underclock it if you can safely and keep brightness low and have it throttle the cpu.





Compare Intel® Products,

 

More ram = more battery life, so don't scale back. This is because Windows uses the hard drive as virtual ram (the paging file) when not enough physical ram exists, and more hard drive use = more battery drain.

faiz, tdp has nothing to do with how much voltage the CPU uses. It deals with how the energy used by the CPU that becomes heat is dissipated. The fact that they both have the same max tdi does not mean they use the same amount of energy.

 

Yub, TDP =/= power usage, this have been talk multiple time already. But also more ram =/= more battery life either. Well your overall theory is correct, but the initial statement is wrong. Most of the time each memory stick consume about the same amount of power. In desktop, you generally have more than 4 or more slots for RAM, so if you populate 4x1GB it will eat more power than 2x1GB, but still roughly take about the same power as 4x2GB. For laptop like M11x, this isn't an issue since both slot very need to be populated anyway. In practice, this generally doesn't work, as laptop drive are still keeping itself spinning, it's true to certain extend that more RAM is better and can reduce battery, but overall operation it doesn't work that way. Say you open an office application, well guess what everytime you doing something fancy in spreadsheet well, excel probably go look up a dll file to do certain thing. A lots of application today are very fragmented and large by nature. And it doesn't load everything in RAM anymore. Also Office application like word and excel keep writing a temporary files anyway, so in that case it doesn't help either as harddrive will be in use from time to time. Maybe if you use something like ubuntu off the usb jumpdrive, then you could very prolong battery life by a lot. Also choosing 5400rpm green drive vs 7200rpm, can factor in some battery difference too, depend on usage. But most likely, if you have to use 5400RPM green drive and it's fine for your usage, then I would say you probably looking at the wrong laptop.

 

I also need much battery life and cause I read in a few benchmarks and reviews that the i7 needs a little more power than the i5 and has not that much more speed I've chosen the i5 ...

sorry that I don't have the links right now...

 

If I understood correctly...

Stick with the i5. Go with the 4 gigs of ram. Keep LED lighting to a minimum. Consider under clocking.

freeman, you mentioned going with the 5400 rpm green drive, but what about SSD? My understanding was that is the way to go for speed and battery life if you can get past the cost.

Robo, if you are able to track them down I'd appreciate it!

 

As you said, not ever one can afford the cost, and not to mention it doesn't fit everyone usage. I use my laptop to edit picture all the time, anything less than 100GB is simply unusable. My old laptop already got like 80GB of data on it, not including OS & programs.

 

If you have big baller status and want to save battery life......

I7, 4gb single stick, 160gb intel ssd, and consider under clocking when on battery. also if you have big baller status kindly send me an exact replica of your m11x r2.

thanks

 

Lol, one isn't enough?

Another no-brainer is to stop unnecessary services running in the background.

 

nope now the old lady is wanting a ultra portable might have to consider another alienware but i think i am gonna try asus for her or the sony z. Time to liquidate all my laptops and start over lolz.

 

I've configed the system as the following...

Intel® Core™ i7 640UM (4M Cache, 1.2 GHZ with 2.266 GHz Max Turbo Frequency) - Overclockable
4GB Dual Channel DDR3 at 800MHz
256GB Solid State Drive
Bluetooth Module, 2.1+ Enhanced Data Rate

With discounts applied I get quoted at $1,565 with tax and what not.

Dropping down to the 160GB 5400RPM drive drops the price to $1,052.
Further dropping down to the i5 gets the price down to $917.
(Alternatively, SSD + i5 is at $1430)

My number one goal is battery life, with a close second being performance when not on the battery. How much of a benefit will I get in the SSD throwing in the extra $500? I'm willing to do it, but adding to the cost by 50% for only say 5-10% benefit would be a bummer.

 

If you're willing to sacrifice storage space, get the 160GB stock HDD and install an Intel X-25M G2 80GB SSD for around $200. You'll get the battery & speed benefits, just with a hit on storage space.

 

If you want battery life go for the R1 IMO. Cheaper, less performance but probably abour 30min-1hour more life.

 

This article shows the SDD added 10 minutes to battery life over a 5400rpm drive Web Surfing Test Shows SSDs Better for Battery Life

And this article by Tomshardware shows certain SDDs to have little to no benefit or even are outperformed by 7200rpm hard drives with respect to battery life depending on the drive and the work load you're doing Flash SSD Update: More Results, Answers : An Apology First ? And One New SSD To Prove Us Right

All in all, saying SDD will always provide a benefit to battery life even over 7200rpm hard drives is not a true generalization. I wouldn't say it's worth $500, but it's your money.

 

where you from with epp and $100 off i can get i7, 160gb, 4gb and BT for $952 plus tax you need the $100 off $999 coupon

 

corwinicre, very interesting, thank you. Although I agree with what someone said in the comments that the test was more about the system as a whole and not the hard drive since loading pages every 30 seconds with no cache wouldn't use much. These articles are also 2 years old, so quite a bit could have changed.

faiz, yeah, you are right. I guess I forgot to go in the cart to get the full discounted price. My bad.

Taking another shot, if I go with the 160GB drive and the i5 it comes out to $883. That is nearly half the price of the fully loaded setup.