Battery life: 7970m vs 680m?

Hi,
I'd like to know how significant the difference between Enduro and Optimus battery life is. While I remember awaken getting around 3,5 hours of light usage with Enduro, I didn't find any info about the GTX 680m.

It'd be great if 7970m and 680m owners could post the average battery life they get during light usage (browsing / office).

 

I doubt there'd be any major difference as light usage should mean only the Intel gpu is used.

 

Little bit in favour of Nvidia as it seems to be less twitchy about going in and out of use.

 

nVIDIA hands down.

They seem to get on average more than 30 minutes more of battery life time (on AVERAGE)

 

My guess was that it's about 3,5 vs 4 hours in Nvidia's favor. I've heard that for some reason Enduro doesn't downclock the GPU as much as Optimus does and thus it consumes more power.

 

I would imagine the 680m would get a little better battery life due to Optimus's maturity vs Enduro... I haven't done a full battery rundown yet but my NP9170 w/ the 7970m goes down to about 85-90% battery in 30 minutes with the screen dimmed, keyboard backlight off, power saving mode, etc.

 

I posted this in that other thread,
Xoticpc made a comparison between the 680 and 7970

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtyBtZnu854&sns=em

Their tests

56min 7979m
1h40min 680m

 

Yes I saw that one already, though that was probably some high load test not the light usage that I'm interested in. :S
Probably Xotic kept the same benchmark running or something to make a very objective comparison, though of course that would be high load.

 

As I said.

Light load there's only ~30 min difference, if it was a whole hour.. then yea 680M surely does have a lot of benefits in the time crises of AMD's Enduro failing

 

Never seen this video. So why the big stink of over the 7970m? Looks like performance isn't that big of a difference and with more mature drivers performance will only get better.

 

I have not done an actual test on mine yet. I did removed the power adapter, and my battery gadget reported I will get about 2 hours on 2nd to the highest screen brightness and everything else on. I will do an actual test once I get home.

 

Don't compare. Get the Nvidia GTX 680m. It is a no contest because 7970m is infested with horror enduro driver issues and ATI/AMD are confuse about their Identity. How can a company like AMD blast Intel when ATI is now AMD then uses an intel cpu together with their GPU. Talk about hypocrites. Choose Nvidia "The Way It's Meant to be Played"

 

These results surprised me. I knew enduro had issues but I didn't know they went so deep as to majorly affect battery life.

 

Am I correct in reading this as meaning that AMD is a hipocrite because laptops are made with Intel CPUs and AMD GPUs? If thats what i'm reading then that is just retarded. AMD doesn't decide what CPUs laptop manufacturers use. Am I some kind of hypocrite for using an Intel cpu and AMD video cards in my current desktop? Or how about one of my older computers back in the day when AMD was stomping on Intel with an AMD dual core and an Nvidia GPU? That’s just either intentionally posting BS or it's just plain ignorance.

 

It'd be great if it were that easy . Unfortunately the GTX 680m costs an extra pile of money over the 7970m that would stretch my budget extremely, so if I can get by with the AMD I'll choose that one; that's why I'm trying to find out how usable it is.

 

As long as I don't game, I get 3:10 on average. I have a P150EM with 7970M.

 

Writing this now with 680m, Wireless on, Flash drive in the slot, and minimal brightness in powersaving mode I am estimating 4hr and 12 minutes of run time. Based on my time in class with the notebooks I would have to say that this is a reasonably accurate representation of the battery life. Without the wireless on I was estimated getting 4 hour and 40 minutes, but I did not actually test this as I need the internet in class.
When purchasing this unit battery life was a big concern for me, and I new that 3 hours 45 minutes with Enduro was not going to cut it. The 7970m does use more juice than the 680m. Neither optimus nor Enduro completely restrict the useage of the dedicated GPU, so when the 7970m runs it uses more power than the 680m. Optimus seems to switch the use to the Dedicated GPU less than Enduro in power saving mode, which would save more energy, but that is just speculation.

Hopefully when official drivers fo the 680m come out the battery life will improve more.

I do not doubt that the 7970m will also do the same, but it is a less energy efficient card overall, and for equivalent useage woudl be expected to use more energy.

 

Please remember that these systems are set up to game while plugged in. Gaming on battery is not the best idea. They do not have large batteries and are not designed to last hours and hours unplugged.

Also, I know the 680M throttles down significantly when on battery so intensive games would not perform well at all. When not gaming, the system doesn't use the discrete GPU much at all so it won't have much impact.