T61 14" 9-cell battery life

Ive more or less decided on getting a Lenovo T61. The only concern thats keeping me from purchasing is the battery life.
What battery life can i except on this specs:

T61 14" WS
T7300 (2.00GHz/4MB/800FSB)
quadro 140m
7200rpm hdd
4gb
9 Cell battery​

OR

the same, but with a 570m​

with

1) light usage, eg office, no wireless, mid brightness, standard powersaving options enabled
2) ultra low optimized usage, eg underclocked to 1GHZ manually, undervolting, Os optimisations, lowest usable brightness, and anything else i can come up with to extend battery life a few minutes.​

Also, how much extra battery life could i get from an ultrabay battery?

edit:

Additional Question #1:

While Im at it, is Lenovos warranty international? If i for instance buy it in the USA, but use it in Germany and it breaks, are there any disadvantages over buying it directly in Germany?​

Additional Question #2:

It seems u can only get discrete 14" OR WWAN with integrated, not discrete + WWAN. Therefore id like to know if its possible to upgrade a t61 with the feature via a pcmia card or expresscard slot or usb stick, because prices for WWAN might actually get affordable in the next few yrs.​

Battery Life the official datasheets suggest:

T61:

6-cell, integrated/discrete graphics: up to 5.7hr/3.8hr
7-cell, integrated/discrete graphics: up to 6.5hr/4.4hr
9-cell, integrated/discrete graphics: up to 8.3hr/#.#hr​

T61p:

14.1" standard (Discrete/Integrated)
6 cell: 4hr / 5.7hr
9 cell: 6hr / 8.6hr​

This values feel kind of biased or is it just me distrusting the values a manufacturer gives about his own system?
​

THX for any help,
GreetZ

 

While Im at it, is Lenovos warranty international? If i for instance buy it in the USA, but use it in Germany and it breaks, are there any disadvantages over buying it directly in Germany?

 

You'll get probably about 4.5-5 hours (generous guess) of battery life with those scenarios. WiFi off would boost your battery life quite a bit as well as mid brightness. The ultrabay battery would realistically add about 30-45 minutes.

 

I bout CTO R61 and checked my warranty coverage. It looks to be supported everywhere.

 

Which video card? You'll get better battery life with the Intel integrated card. Also, on Lenovo's product pages you will see underneath each product option (i.e. on the T-series page) a PDF datasheet which details some battery life averages for several of the CTO options. I have a 14" T61p 9-cell battery with discrete video card and I get around 5 hours.

 

mateyo, i stated the graphics card in the first post: Quadro 140m.
T61Ps always have a 570m right? If you get 5hrs with the better gfx card, then i should be able to get slightly more with just the 140m right? Still, 5hrs seems a bit too much. Not that im sceptical of u, more of the laptop. How did you achieve those 5hrs? Were you doing anything on ur laptop?
It would be really cool, if you got 5hrs of a t61p, coz then id definitly opt for the 570m. The only necessity concerning battery life is that it lasts 4~5hrs whilst only taking notes so it can hold out for as long as i have school. What would the rough dif between 570m and 140m battery-wise be?

Another question just came to mind: It seems u can only get discrete 14" OR WWAN with integrated, not discrete + WWAN. Therefore id like to know if its possible to upgrade a t61 with the feature via a pcmia card or expresscard slot or usb stick, because prices for WWAN might actually get affordable in the next few yrs.

 

Woops. I skimmed it for nVidia and Intel and not Quadro so I overlooked it. My mistake.

Yes I do get around 5 hours with power source optimized mode and just doing light to moderate things like reading PDF's, email, browsing, chatting, and a bit of programming (and this isn't just one at a time, it's more like all at once).

Like I said, look at the datasheet and it will give you a pretty close estimate of what you would expect to get. It has the hours for several configurations (integrated/discrete/6-cell/9-cell/etc).

If you take just notes, then it should definitely last a good amount of time.

 

I just calculated what battery life i could expect from a 9 cell batt on a t61: 5,67hrs. The odd thing is, that the t61p is sposed to have about half an hour more battery life. That seems more than odd, considering that it has the more powerful gfx card...

 

Where does it say the 'p' versions are supposed to have more battery life?

 

Ive edited the battery life that the datasheets availible on the official T Series site of lenovo state, into my first post.
T61 is sposed to have 8.3hrs with integrated and 9-cell, while the t61p is sposed to have 8.6hrs with the same configuration.
Thats y i seriously question the rightness(whats a better word?) of the pdf datasheets lenovo provides.

 

You missread I think...

T61:
9-cell, integrated/discrete graphics
up to 8.3hr/#.#hr

T61p:
14.1" standard (Discrete/Integrated)
9 cell: 6hr / 8.6hr

The T61 has 2.3 hours more battery life for integrated gfx... which sounds normal considering the gfx chipset in both configs.

I read the T61 with discrete gfx has about 5.5 hours of battery life. The T61p with discrete figure of 8.6 indeed sounds pretty odd.

 

Ultrabay battery info is also in the datasheets last time I checked, if I am remembering correctly. And yeah, I think they flip around the integrated/discrete info on some of the sheets so it might read it backwards (i.e. discrete/integrated).

 

Even if they flipped it, whether 6hrs NOR 8.6hrs is realistic for discrete gfx. Btw, i thought the whole point of t61P was its 570m?
Still looking for battery life of t61p vs. t61 both discrete.

 

Oh and I think the word you might be looking for is correctness or accuracy.

The estimates Lenovo provides is pretty good I think (within 0.5-1 hrs for mine). Although you do get more hours with the integrated the difference may be marginal for the differences between the discrete nVidia cards. I think the battery gain is due in part mostly by the Penryn processor and not the graphics card in normal use. If you are doing more taxing graphical tasks then it's possible to drain it a bit quicker with a beefier card.

And I think when you calculated your estimate for a T61 with a 9-cell you need to keep in mind my 5-5.5 hr usage time is not what is listed as the estimate which is 6. So that 5.67 you calculated might end up being 4.5-5 if I had that system in my situation.

 

Thats simply not possible. According to Wikipedia theres a difference of 20 W between the 140m and the 570m. I know, this is only relevant when playing games, but the 570m definitely needs to have a higher voltage than the 140m to work with such a higher core clocking. Higher voltage ergos higher battery consumption even in idle mode, as the voltage of gfx cards sadly cant be modified.
So Im really doubting that the t61 has worse battery life than the t61P.
I could really use input from owners here.

 

Where's that info on Wikipedia?

I haven't found any sources that say what they actually use at idle for either card. However, it is also a possibility that there are other factors involved which give one system the advantage in power consumption overall. And I still consider that nVidia could have done something to the 570m for battery life. And isn't that what Powermizer is for? Again I want to make clear that the estimates I said were for normal usage (no playing games or graphically intensive tasks) which I think can be a possibility. In the case you do graphically intensive tasks then yes, I do believe the power usage no longer is marginal between discrete cards. But for idle usage I wouldn't rule out that they implemented something to extend battery life so the difference isn't so large. We can count our watts and volts all we want, but in the end I think it's only the tip of the iceberg.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_11761.html
http://www.nvidia.com/object/feature_powermizer.html#seven

Penryn battery life: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3195&p=2

I still stand by the battery life estimates on those datasheets, but I do believe again that they are a little too ideal (the bias) by a deviation of about 0.5-1 hr. Maybe it would help to know how many hours of battery life minimum do you require?


BTW, someone else has a T61p with a 9-cell and says 5 hours as well. Also, someone here said they had a T61 with a 9-cell and they get 3-4 hours.
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=50693&highlight=battery+life