Intel Core i5-2520M and The Asus K53E Notebook
Power Consumption and Battery Life Analysis
Before bringing this article to a close, we'll take a look at power consumption of the Asus K53E notebooks. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power this new Intel Sandy Bridge notebook test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and while under a heavy workload.
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The Asus K53E consumed significantly less power than its quad-core counterpart at full load, though at idle, both chips hovered at around the same power consumption of 16 Watts or so. If you look at things from a performance-per-watt perspective, what Intel has done with the Sandy Bridge architecture is pretty impressive versus the Core 2 architecture of old. Versus Arrandale, the new Sandy Bridge Core i5 offers a significant increase in performance, as we showed you previously, for virtually no increase in power consumption across similar platform configurations. And with its more aggressive clock gating, battery life should play out better for Sandy Bridge as well.
Notes on Battery Life Performance:
Which brings us to battery life with the Asus K53E. At first we ran our traditional Battery Eater Pro test and under its rather heavy load, we saw power drain from the machine in only 96 minutes or so. However, this test taxes the processor and its graphics core continuously and with Sandy Bridge's higher Turbo Boost speeds, pushing a lightly-threaded heavy workload continuously may, or may not represent the average end user usage model. So, instead we decided to fire-up that 1080p HD video movie trailer and loop it in the background, while continuously refreshing web pages that have a fair amount of Flash content on them. We ran this test with mid-level screen brightness and all wireless and wired network ports enabled (WiFi connected and surfing the web). The result? The Asus K53E actually lasted 3 hours and 54 minutes under this more realistic workload. Watching a movie, or possibly even two shorter mindless, action flicks, on that long flight back from the West coast, is totally doable for you Yanks out there, with this powerful, full-featured 15-inch notebook.
Notes on Battery Life Performance:
Which brings us to battery life with the Asus K53E. At first we ran our traditional Battery Eater Pro test and under its rather heavy load, we saw power drain from the machine in only 96 minutes or so. However, this test taxes the processor and its graphics core continuously and with Sandy Bridge's higher Turbo Boost speeds, pushing a lightly-threaded heavy workload continuously may, or may not represent the average end user usage model. So, instead we decided to fire-up that 1080p HD video movie trailer and loop it in the background, while continuously refreshing web pages that have a fair amount of Flash content on them. We ran this test with mid-level screen brightness and all wireless and wired network ports enabled (WiFi connected and surfing the web). The result? The Asus K53E actually lasted 3 hours and 54 minutes under this more realistic workload. Watching a movie, or possibly even two shorter mindless, action flicks, on that long flight back from the West coast, is totally doable for you Yanks out there, with this powerful, full-featured 15-inch notebook.
