Gigabyte Booktop M1022 Review

Netbook Battery Life Comparison

We’ve expanded our battery life testing on netbooks to include many scenarios, at least for now. Since most netbooks don’t include optical drives, we ripped our standard test DVD to a hard drive and copied those files over. Obviously there’s a benefit to not powering a spinning DVD, but even without that advantage the netbooks provide much better battery life than higher performance laptops. We also have x264, DivX HD, and Xvid tests to show if there’s a difference in codec performance.

Compared to most laptops, the M1022 battery life is admirable, ranging from over seven hours at idle to a worst-case 4:11 doing x264 720p decoding. We tested various power draws with the laptop plugged in and found that power draw peaks at 17W while running 3DMark. x264 decoding isn’t far from that, drawing almost 16W with the LCD at maximum brightness, so you should get 4-7.5 hours of battery life depending on what you’re doing. The more common usage scenarios of Internet surfing or less complex video decoding all end up providing around six hours of battery life. That’s great compared to laptops, but other netbooks do quite a bit better.

The ASUS 1005HA is the most efficient netbook we’ve tested to date. In relative battery life, the 1005HA manages 37% more minutes per Watt-hour of battery capacity. ASUS is slightly underclocking their CPU using the default settings, but even without that advantage (i.e. at the “High” performance setting in their Super Hybrid Engine) ASUS still manages 29% better battery life. Putting things in perspective, based on battery capacity the ASUS 1005HA is using 8.1W (8.6W without underclocking) in the Internet Battery test while the Gigabyte M1022 consumes 11.1W, with both systems at 100 nits. Some of that difference comes from the choice of LCD panel, but other components and BIOS optimizations likely play a role as well; regardless, at these low power draws a difference of 2.5W is clearly noticeable. For reference, in the same test the NV52 consumes around 21.1W and the NV58 consumes about 15.6W.