Let's face it, if you're shopping for an ultrabook, you're less concerned with gaming performance and more interested in what kind of battery life you can squeeze out of these featherweight systems. This is perhaps the most important metric, at least for some, and what we have below are examples of worst case and best case scenarios under light and heavy workloads.
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Battery Eater Pro Stress Test and Web Browsing Light Duty Test |
Light and Heavy Duty Workloads |
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The results below are from our combined Battery Eater Pro (worst case) and Web Browsing only (almost best case) tests. BEP beats on the CPU, GPU, disk and memory while it renders a 3D image and rotates it in real time on the screen. Our light duty, web browser test refreshes a web page of mixed text, graphics, HTML and Flash, every 3 minutes. Both tests are run with display brightness set to 50% with no sleep timers enabled. All other power plan options are left as delivered from the manufacturer. Please note we currently only have three ultrabook datapoints listed here for the web browser only test.
Now here's an area where the IdeaPad U300s really excels. In our worst case Battery Eater Pro test, we only realized about 2 hours of uptime. However, with light duty web browsing, we saw something around 6 hours of untethered freedom. The U300s was second best in our battery life test, only pulling up behind Dell's XPS 13. Incidentally, Dell does some fairly aggressive dialing of their machine, as delivered from the factory, in terms of power savings settings, beyond display brightness. So if you're willing to tweak on the IdeaPad's settings a bit here and there, you could likely realize even more battery life. As a side note, we were able to extract about 4 hours of continuous 1080p HD video playback on the U300s as well.