Why Is Sager Battery Life So Poor???

Can someone explain to me why Sager/Clevo notebooks have such poor battery life? That is, why do similarly equipped systems from other brands have batteries that last so much longer?

Even if one accounts for the fact that the watt hours of the sager battery is lower than most and extrapolates battery performance to a 84WH battery (2 * 42WH OEM battery) by doubling battery life to 2 hours (2 * 1 hour on 42WH battery for NP8700), making this theoretical battery the largest notebook battery I've heard of, Sager's battery life still greatly under performs. As a Sager owner I bought the notebook for gaming and know that battery life is not the focus of their notebooks, but still, it puzzles me how there could be such a difference.

Are Clevo motherboards just that inefficient? Or could it be the an inefficient BIOS? It seems unlikely to be components because systems with very similar components (e.g. some Asus and macbooks) often have MUCH more than 2 hours of battery life.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

The power draw is actually lower than other brands with same specs as tested on notebookcheck, it's just that the batteries are of lower capacity.

 

Apart from the weak battery - half that of other brands, as you said - the main eater of battery life in a high-end gaming laptop is the GPU. Even when downclocked, they still eat plenty of power when idle. However, the Clevos with the HD 5870 don't downclock the GPU when idle, which lowers battery life by quite a lot.

The MSI GX640 has quite good battery life for a high-end gaming laptop, but it still only gets around 3 hours at most with manual GPU downclocking. Anything that gets a lot more battery life than that is almost certainly using a far weaker GPU.

If more manufacturers used switchable graphics, you could see a laptop with a high-end card and decent battery life, though. Nvidia's Optimus should encourage this kind of thing, I'd hope.

 

At least in the case of the 8690, the design is probably what's preventing the addition of a higher capacity battery as well.

For other models with the batteries at the back, higher capacity batteries will stick out and/or raise the notebook from the rear. On the 8690, the battery is, unfortunately, located flat on the underside and has to be flush. I don't think it'd be possible to add a higher capacity battery in this location and still have the underside of the notebook balanced.

 

I don't understand why they didn't put an onboard graphics so we could use Nvidia's Hybrid SLI

 

Thanks for the replies. This is starting to make sense. So it seems like it's a combination of battery capacity and GPU. I guess having a larger battery like some of the other notebooks might roughly double the time the notebook runs on battery to 2 hours and then a more efficient GPU could elongate that to 3 hours +....