Battery life and portability of Genesis IV

L

Lavaridge

Active member
I'm thinking of buying the Genesis IV with the following specs:

15.6" AUO Matte 95% Gamut LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor i5-3210M (2.50GHz)
4GB SAMSUNG 1600MHz SODIMM DDR3 MEMORY
NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 630M - 1GB DDR3
120GB INTEL® 520 SERIES SSD
Upgrade to 62.16WH 6 Cell Lithium-ION Battery

I was wondering what sort of battery life I could expect. I appreciate that you probably don't have exact figures for every combination, but I would like to know what sort of effect I'm likely to get from the upgraded battery. Also, since I don't really want the graphics card, but I'm forced to buy it if I want the screen (which I hear is quite good), I'd like to know what effect on battery life that is likely to have (if I use Bumblebee/Optimus to have it disabled most of the time).

Thankyou for any help :)
 
PCS

PCS

Administrator
Staff member
Welcome to our forums :)

Battery life is always a difficult question to answer, but Nvidia Optimus technology helps preserve battery life as much as possible.

Under "normal" usage in UMA mode (using the integrated graphics) you can expect up to 4 hours battery life. An upgraded 62.16WH battery will increase the battery life by 27%.
 
L

Lavaridge

Active member
I'm quite happy with that then - as long as I can get Optimus working properly on Ubuntu. My current laptop only gives about 1.5 hours :D Thankyou very much.

And is that 27% on top of four hours or had you already taken that into account?
 
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PCS

PCS

Administrator
Staff member
L

Lavaridge

Active member
I've already ordered, but thanks for the offer. I'm not to bothered by exact battery life though, as long as it's reasonable, and I've ordered the higher capacity battery so hopefully there won't be much problem there. If I do end up with four+ hours I will certainly be very happy though :D

Thanks for the Optimus links - though the first few posts are outdated I think because Bumbleebee says it does have support for GT630Ms. Unless there's something unusual about this particular laptop?

Just out of interest, Wikipedia says that NVidia Optimus cards default to 'off' if bumblebee/Ndriver isn't installed or doesn't work. Is this true, and does it mean that battery life shouldn't be impacted whether Optimus works on linux or not?
 
PCS

PCS

Administrator
Staff member
I'm not sure unfortunately - we don't use/test our laptops using Linux, but perhaps another member might be able to answer your question here.
 
L

Lavaridge

Active member
No worries. I'll find out for myself I guess once it arrives :D

I'll post here as well if it does end up working well with Linux - just in case anyone wants to know in future :)
 
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S

Smurfette

Active member
I'm sure it'll work fine. Although it is set up as a VM, I have Fedora 17 running on my Vortex III. It seems happy with the drivers after some tweaking to make them play nicely together :)
 
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