Asus Eee PC1005PE, Atom N450 Pinetrail Launch

To test the battery life of the Pinetrail-based Asus Eee PC 1005PE, we ran Battery Eater Pro. We used BEP’s built-in Classic test which loads both the CPU and GPU until the battery runs out of power. During the test, wireless radios were enabled, audio was on, and the screen was set to always on, though auto power saving mode with Asus' Super Hybrid Engine software was enabled.  The following benchmark is sort of a worst case scenario, real-world test setup.  Since it continually taxes the graphics processor as well as the CPU, you could argue that battery life may in fact be longer under lighter duty workloads like simple word processing. 

However, trade-offs are also in place in other areas as well.  For example, web browsing would exercise networking components in the system, which otherwise in our test setup remain almost entirely idle.  As such, we feel that no one specific battery test condition can measure battery life completely from all usage models.  That said, as long as the playing field is level, we can easily measure battery life of a product competitively versus peer products in a given category.

Asus Eee PC 1005PE Standard 6-Cell Battery

When all was said and done, the Asus Eee PC 1005PE lasted an impressive 416 minutes in Battery Eater Pro's Classic test with its stock 6-cell battery, or roughly 6.9 hours.  Although the machine's performance is about on par with or slightly better than Atom / 945G based netbooks, the Asus Eee PC 1005PE and its Pinetrail platform seem to offer measurably better battery life. If the machine lasted 6.9 hours with BEP, which puts a heavy load on the processor and graphics core as well, significantly longer battery life can be expected from this machine under less strenuous circumstances.  Whether or not you can actually realize the Asus-claimed 14hr mark that is so boldly emblazoned on the product, is another story. 

Incidentally, we also measured the Eee PC 1005PE's power draw from its tiny AC adapter brick, under both idle conditions and when the machine was under full load.  This netbook draws as little as 8.4 Watts when idle and peaked out at 15.2 Watts under load - it's pretty amazing actually.