M1330 - Battery drain - what uses more juice?

I am confirguring my M1330, however I am questioning what drains the batter faster:

1) the speed of the chip
2) ram
3) video card?
4) the hard drive (faster rpm vs. slower rpm)

I plan to open a lot of Illustrator art files for my business.... also watch a lot of DVD's on the airplane while traveling.

Thanks

 

I can tell you what it isn't, it's not the RAM. I would think it's the processor and the hard drive.

 

Well it's kind of hard to tell but this is what I'd guess:

I'd say that the dedicated video card is going to drain the battery the most (vs the integrated).
After that I'm leaning towards the processor, depending on how many "steps" you're upgrading...
Then I'd say the Hard Drive. It's hard to tell with the hard drive because the newer ones, as far as I know, don't take up much more battery life than the 5400 RPMs. No one has actually been able to test yet, though.
RAM would be last on the list.

 

I hear the upgraded Nvidia can do up to a full hour of battery loss

 

What about the LCD (CCFL) drain? If you order with the LED backlit screen it would probably be less of an issue.

From previous experience with desktop PCs its usually the GFX card or the CPU if you overclock it.

 

A dedicated video card will use more power than the Intel integrated graphics.

The M1330 doesn't have low voltage CPU options so the CPUs should have very similar power drain under light load (although I wonder whether the low cost T5250 lacks the 800MHz @ 0.85V mode of the faster CPU).

If the information is correct then the LED backlight will also save some power.

7200rpm HDDs use more power than 5400rpm HDDs of the same generation and some brands of HDD tend to use more power than others. You can compare idle and maximum HDD power at the Tom's Hardware 2.5" HDD charts.

Anandtech's latest study of Turbo Memory suggests that it gives benefit when running on batttery by reducing HDD activity. However, this isn't an option in the M1330 (I would love to know if it woud work if a module is put in one of those mini PCI-E slots).

One way to stretch DVD playback time is to use a memory card as ReadyBoost. I tried this on my Samsung Q35 and found that it added about 10% to the battery time. I think Vista was caching DVD data on the memory card so the ODD only played intermittently. I am also planning to test the effect of compressing the whole DVD onto a memory card so the ODD doesn't need to run and, in theory, the HDD can go to sleep as well.

John