In the following benchmarks we employ two very different battery life tests, Battery Eater Pro and a custom 1080p HD video loop test developed in-house, to prove out battery life with our test group of machines. In all tests,
Windows 10 Quiet Hours has been enabled and the displays are
calibrated with lux meters on pure white screens to as close to 115 lux as possible. For the average laptop this is somewhere between a 40 - 60% brightness setting. Since laptop displays significantly affect power consumption and battery life, it's important to ensure a level playing field with respect to brightness of the display for battery testing. However, since many laptop displays vary in brightness at each respective setting in Windows, this calibration with the meter is critical to ensure all displays are set to as near identical brightness as possible before testing.
Battery Life - How We Test:
Our custom HotHardware video loop test takes a 1080p HD video with a 16Kbps bit rate and loops it repeatedly, with 1 minute break intervals in between. A timer log file increments minutes of up-time every minute -- along with the grand total -- before system shutdown is stored in the log. This is a lighter-duty test that is still a bit more strenuous than many office productivity tasks, but it's not nearly as taxing as the load Battery Eater puts on a system.
When it came to battery life testing, the HP EliteBook x360 1030 stood out in the crowd. Our video loop benchmark puts the system through a moderate workload that's heavier than what most people do on a day-to-day basis. So, the fact we were able to get nearly eight hours of content consumption was impressive enough.
Unlike our video benchmark, Battery Eater Pro is a running flat-out sort of benchmark that does everything it can to kill your battery as fast as it can. With that being the case, we were happy to see the HP EliteBook x360 1030 was able to hang on to life for three hours before succumbing to this cruel benchmark. Three hours isn't the longest we have seen a laptop run under such an intense load, but it's close and it validated the score of our more real-world video playback loop test.
