Battery Testing with W3J and BOTH batteries (primary & optical)

So before buying both my previous A8Jm and my current W3J, I had a lot of questions about battery life. Now that I am the proud owner of a W3J with both the primary 8-cell battery and the secondary optical drive battery, I thought I'd do some tests and give back to the community that has been so helpful to me in the past.

I'm going to report back once I've got more numbers but so far it looks like the optical battery gives me a bit over 2 hours with 13% brightness, WiFi on, BT off, and iTunes running (playing music constantly).

I've removed the primary battery and am running on optical battery only for now. Test setup is as described below:

***TEST SETUP***
-13% LCD brightness (next to lowest setting)
-WiFi on
-Bluetooth off
-AJAX-based instant messenger running for WiFi activity ( www.meebo.com)
-iTunes running and playing music constantly, no visualizations
-screen and standby timeouts disabled


***RESULTS*** ***OPTICAL BATTERY ONLY***
[0:00] RMClock predicts 2:26 @ 96%
[0:43] RMClock predicts 1:30 @ 68%
[0:53] RMClock predicts 1:19 @ 60%
[1:01] RMClock predicts 1:09 @ 53%
[1:12] RMClock predicts 0:57 @ 44%
[1:26] RMClock predicts 0:42 @ 33%
[1:41] RMClock predicts 0:26 @ 22%
[1:49] RMClock predicts 0:19 @ 15%
[1:55] RMClock predicts 0:12 @ 10%
[2:03] Complete discharge, switches to primary

***RESULTS*** ***PRIMARY BATTERY***
[2:03] Optical battery completes discharge
[2:07] RMClock predicts 3:50 @ 97.5%
[2:34] RMClock predicts 3:16 @ 86%
[3:01] RMClock predicts 2:46 @ 74%
[3:17] RMClock predicts 2:30 @ 66%
[3:56] RMClock predicts 1:45 @ 47%
[4:11] RMClock predicts 1:24 @ 40%
[4:26] RMClock predicts 1:11 @ 33%
[4:43] RMClock predicts 0:52 @ 25%
[4:59] RMClock predicts 0:37 @ 18%
[5:14] RMClock predicts 0:21 @ 10%
[5:24] RMClock predicts 0:10 @ 5%

 

That sounds promising. Do you have a scale or anything so that you can measure the weight of the entire notebook with both batteries installed?

 

I'll see if I can find a postal scale around the office somewhere.

 

How much does screen brightness affect the battery life? Perhaps test at 50% and 100% if you can?

 

I plan on doing that too, although perhaps not 50% and 100%. I find the backlight on the W3J to be quite bright (much more so than the A8Jm) and I personally can't imagine anyone would need more than 40% brightness on battery (seriously, it's very bright). Anything over 40% is pretty much overkill, I rarely use more than 40% even when plugged in. I guess I could do 100% just for fun once I've done 20 and 40.

Here's my assessment of W3J brightness

13% - Adequate for low to moderate light situations, maximum useable battery life

20% - Much better than 13%, still good battery life, comfortable for use in most situations except possibly direct light or very high ambient lighting.

40% - Very bright, comfortable in all but direct sunlight, easy for multiple viewers to see.

 

Any idea what LCD panel is used in your W3J? The higher brightness might be the reason why the battery life times reported for the W3J isn't much better than the A8Jm even though the main battery is 34% higher capacity. The brighter backlight/screen should use a lot more power.

 

Actually with the A8Jm I could barely scratch out 3 hours with WiFi on and 13% brightness, whereas with the W3J I get well over 3:30 with those same settings (almost 4 hours but I still need to do an exact test). Perhaps some people are turning up their LCD brightness on the W3J too much and thus reporting lower battery times?

No idea how I would check what kind of LCD panel my W3J has. Suggestions?

 

Alright going to lunch now. I put the primary battery in when the optical was at 2.7%. No problem at all. It also switched from optical to primary without so much as a blink or a hiccup. Keep in mind that I formatted my W3J myself (10 gig NTFS windows primary, 90 gig NTFS logical)

I'll be back to report on the progress of the primary battery in a bit.

 

if you look at the A8jm is only a 53whr battery, meaning if your discharge rate it about 19whr, do 53/19 = 2.7 hours of batterylife...roughly two and a half hours. Unless someone can show or make their discharge rate lower and keep it that low for an average.

The W3J main battery is 71 whr thus it gets more batterylife.

And yes screen brightness does affect batterylife.

 

Since 5% is where most people's computers will go into standby/hibernate, it looks like 5 hours and 24 minutes is the final answer for this test.

A couple of things to keep in mind:

1) iTunes was running and playing music the ENTIRE duration of the test. Thus, the hard drive never had a chance to go into standby, and was actively streaming music at all times. I did this in order to make up for the fact that I wasn't actively web surfing (although I did do my best to simulate light to moderate wifi activity by having a web-based instant messenger loaded the entire time and carrying on intermittent conversations with people).

2) Bluetooth was disabled - I suspect you'd come in at under 5 hours total if you use Bluetooth.

3) Screen brightness was at 13%. This might be too low for some people. I consider it adequate for low to moderate ambient light usage. 20% would probably be better for guaranteed comfortable usage in most normal circumstances.

4) WiFi on - I'm betting that with both WiFi and BT disabled, you could probably get 6 hours or better. Granted this would only be useful for certain scenarios, but I feel it's worth mentioning.

 

How much music is on your iTunes? This can vary the memory usage quite abit.

 

i dont think memeory usage will play a big part in battery life...thats taking it too far...the memory needs to be powered regardless.i dont think they power the memory less based on usage...even if that is the case it can be negligible

 

Well depending on how many songs you have it can put more stress (usage) on your memory and cpu. I have this problem with my PC, but maybe it's because I have too much music

Personally I think evey application you use can alter your battery consumption quite a bit, but I guess that depends on what applications we're talking about.

 

Great stuff!

 

I didn't pay attention to memory usage but I never saw CPU usage go over 5%. I have 185 files in iTunes (about 11.8 hours worth)

 

Yeah, tip of the iceburg

Arrrghh (pirate symbol) Just kidding!

 

realy nice to know that for a casual use of the w3j, one can get 5h24min. the battery is the thing that has kept me waging between hp nc8430 and asus w3j. thank you very much sabrewulf165, now im off to buy w3j, because 5h24min is adequate for my needs =)

 

Thanks for your findings. Now I have to consider if I will need media bay battery...

Have you tried downclocking X1600? Or is it negligible?

 

Thanks for taking the time to do this! those results are extremely usefull

 

The X1600 downclocks itself as long as you have ATI's "Powerplay" setup correctly. I didn't try downclocking it any further than that.

 

Did you happen to weigh your system?

 

Just bought the optical battery.

It failed to switch to the main battery when the optical one ran out out juice.

Any idea? Thanks.

 

anything else beside ati powerplay that will underclock the graphics auto?