Battery Life and Conclusions (so far)
Battery Life
To test battery life we set the LCD display to 50%, disable the WiFi antenna, and disable any power saving feature available. We then run MobileMark 2005 and Battery Eater Pro to get two very different measurements. Mobile Mark 2005 simulates an office environment with spreadsheets and wordprocessing, whereas Battery Eater Pro loads the CPU, graphics, and HDD 100% to drain the system as quickly as possible. So consider these results the two opposites of the same spectrum.
A big improvement here in terms of battery life! Just by upgrading the BIOS to v901, we were able to boost our battery runtime to almost the same duration as the Core Duo. The Core 2 Duo does take more voltage to run, so it’s a given that battery life is going to suffer a bit, but the differences are small.
Conclusions
With the new BIOS update, we’re coming closer to figuring out the exact nature of this new CPU. We now have a clearer picture of battery life, and which benchmarks need updating in order to reflect changes in the CPU. The most significant result we’ve shown you today are the battery life results. While the Core 2 Duo does shorten the battery life by 8 minutes in Mobile Mark compared to the older Core Duo, the new CPUs do provide improved performance and 64-bit extensions for Windows Vista. It’s up to the consumer now to decide whether the small hit in the battery is worth the small boost in performance.
PC Perspective Related Articles:
- Core 2 Duo T7400 Running in a Dell M1710
- Core 2 Duo Mobile T7400 Review
- Core 2 Duo Desktop Review (X6800, E6700)
- Core 2 Duo Technology Overview
The Intel Core 2 Duo T7400 will be available at your favorite retailer soon enough, but in the meantime there are some great deals on current model laptops using the very capable Core Duo CPUs. Use our handy PriceGrabber service to find the lowest price including shipping!
