Expected battery life UltraNote IV 15.6"

Hi! I'm the lucky owner of a PC Specialist UltraNote IV 15.6", with Full HD IPS panel and a i5-7300HQ on-board :yes:

I'm curious to know what would you say it would be the expected battery life of the 44 Wh Li-Ion battery.

I'm quite puzzled by the results I'm getting, but I would like to hear your opinion before posting my results.

And of course I know it greatly depends on a lot of circumstances, such as screen brightness, CPU load, attached external devices, WiFi and Bluetooth usage etc... I would describe my common situation usage as "lazily browsing the Internet thru WiFi, no video streaming, 50% screen brightness, Bluetooth off, no external devices connected".

So, how many hours would you say I should get, approximately?

Thanks!

... of course I meant battery charge duration, not really the 'expected life of the battery pack'.

Also, I forgot to mention I've got a traditional 7200 rpm 500 GB HD, not an SDD one.

Thanks!

No answers?

No idea I'm afraid. The ultranotes are traditionally ultrabook-type laptops with ULV CPUs (ultra low voltage). But your one is a newish offering from PCS coming with an -H series CPU that might have 2-3 times the power consumption (gauging by the TDP anyway).

So it seems it has a more powerful CPU without having a larger battery than the Ultranotes with weaker, less hungry CPUs.

But as it's quite a new offering by PCS I'm not sure how many other forum member swill have one to compare notes with you.

Thank you Oussebon - unfortunately you're probably spot-on.

I'm not getting very bad battery duration, honestly, but the point is that when I compare it to what I get with my wife's DELL work notebook equipped with a similar capacity battery (48 Wh - say 10% more than my PCS notebook) ... well, that last about one time and an half. But the DELL haven't got a Full HD screen, and it's equipped with a i3-6006U ...

By chance, do you know where I can read the 'minimum' consumption of processors? I can only find 'typical' TDP :|

I don't.

If you look up both CPUs on notebookcheck, however, you can find reviews of different laptops with those CPUs in which include figures for power consumption. From my brief glance, the maximum idle power consumption of laptops with the 7300HQ and 1080p screen is unsurprisingly 40-50% more than one with the 6006U and a 1366x768 screen, which would seem similar to what you're experiencing.

i5s also get turbo boost, plus periodic spikes in CPU load (e.g. opening certain webpages) will cause the power consumption to increase.

Have you looked at your power plan settings to make sure you're squeezing as much out as you can?

Power plan is set to 'use as much CPU as you need it', as I don't want it to become slow when I need it faster. Of course I know that putting the processor in 'fixed 800 MHz mode no matter what' would save more but - I would have bought an 800 MHz processor instead, right?

Thanks for your help. I'm probably getting as much as I can get, and that's actually what I wanted to understand (and now I'm wondering why ULV processors weren't in the options... or an optional bigger battery pack)

According to Linux Mint's Power Statistics tool, the power consumption is 7.5 W when there are no programs running (foreground) and screen brightness is at 50%. When the screen automatically dims after a minute, it goes at 6.4 W.

Just browsing the Internet, it easily goes over 10 W, with some spikes even over 20 W (!!!!)

Will run the same test on that DELL i3-6006U when I'll have a chance.

sverx said:

According to Linux Mint's Power Statistics tool, the power consumption is 7.5 W when there are no programs running (foreground) and screen brightness is at 50%.

Click to expand...

I didn't realize that was with WiFi ON (connected) and keyboard backlight ON (at lowest setting). Turning both off, the power consumption went to 7.3 W.

I think it's pretty much for just a screen at half brightness and 4 CPU cores idling at 800 MHz, IMHO, but that's in no way an opinion of an expert.

Well it sounds like you're getting to squeeze a bit more battery life out then

No, not more than before. 7.5 W when doing *nothing* means that I could leave it turned on (at 50% screen brightness) and connected to Internet for approx. 6 hours. Of course there's no use for that, it's for saying.

Using it, I can barely hit 4 hours, which means I'm using an average of approx 11 W per hour.

I'm honestly hoping that they will release a bigger battery. A 66 Wh for instance would mean 6 hours for me, which is what I was hoping since the beginning. After all, I'm just browsing the net...

(now the same model it's available also with a i5-7200U, which probably improves quite a bit)