Lenovo ThinkPad T410s with NVIDIA Optimus Review
Gaming & Battery Life
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Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. is an aerial warfare video game that takes place during the time of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. Players have the opportunity to take the throttle of over 50 famous aircrafts in both solo and 4-player co-op missions, and take them over real world locations and cities in photo-realistic environments created with the best commercial satellite data provided by GeoEye. |
Like its predecessor, HAWX 2 isn't the most graphically challenging game you can run when using its low-quality settings. That's good news for the T410s, as we saw smooth game play all the way up to 4x AA.
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Dirt 2 was released in September 2009 and provides a sequel to the original Colin McRae: Dirt racing game. Codemasters delayed the PC version of Dirt 2 so that they could enhance their Ego engine with DirectX 11 effects. Dirt 2 is also a solid benchmark for multi-core processors since DX11 is designed to take advantage of multi-threaded system architectures. |
We saw an average frame rate of 31 FPS in Dirt 2, with ultra low settings and no anit-aliasing. It didn't run completely smooth at all times, but was playable for the most part.
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Call of Pripyat is the third game in the STALKER series and throws in DX11 to the mix. This benchmark is based on one of the locations found within the latest game. Testing includes four stages and utilizes various weather conditions, as well as different time of day settings. It offers a number of presets and options, including multiple versions of DirectX, resolutions, antialiasing, etc. SunShafts represents the most graphically challenging stage available. |
In STALKER, the T410s recorded average frame rates of 23 FPS with minimum settings and no AA. Performance takes a serious hit when turning up AA so we recommend going without it.
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To test all battery life claims, we use the notebook benchmark tool Battery Eater Pro running in Classic mode and record the time it takes for the laptop to run out of power and shut down.
With Battery Eater Pro running, it took 108 minutes for the T401s to use up a full charge. The battery life we experienced was on par with Dell's XPS 14, which sports a Core i5 460M and NVIDIA Optimus infused graphics. Note that this benchmark puts a continuous load on the graphics card (the Intel IGP in this case), as well as the CPU so we consider this result as a "worst case" result. With a lighter workload combined with idle time periods, the T410s will keep its charge much longer due to the advantages offered by Optimus technology.
