Eee PC 900 battery life tests. Thoughts on Atom.

Posted on 06 May 2008, Last updated on 11 November 2019 by

The Eee PC madness continues. There must be 20+ Eee PC web sites by now and every day there’s at least one good set of new information. I’ve even seen a couple of Eee PC books on Amazon which just shows what sort of a market there must be out there. The Eee PC ecosystem alone must be ten times larger that that of the traditional ultra mobile PC market and that’s not including the rest of the netbook market! There’s no way we can highlight all the news here in the front page but we are trying to get all the good article links into the links database so that you have a nice central point to find them all when needed. Today, it’s the turn of Blogeee who have written up, what looks like an extensive review on the French language website. One part of it I do understand is the battery life testing section which highlights the extreme end of the battery capacity issue where some users are getting their Eee PC 900 with a 15% smaller capacity battery than was shipped with the Eee PC 701.

In the worst case, a video playback test, the Eee PC 900 was returning under 1 hour with the 4400mah battery which I find a little too low. In fact, if you look closely at the differences between the 4400 and 5200mah results, there’s more like a 30% capacity difference than 15%. I suspect that their 4400mah battery was a little worn. Either that or the real capacity of the battery is even less than 4400mah. The other possibility is that the 4400mah battery is dropping below the power-down level far sooner than the 5200mah battery which looks to be returning results just as expected. 2.5-3hrs isn’t bad at all for an office test but look at how much difference a web-session makes. It’s a result of the Wifi radio and rich web pages that do that. Web surfing is a CPU-heavy operation these days. [Thoughts about Atom after the break…]

So what should we expect from an Atom version of the Eee PC 900? Well, we’ve talked about this before and warned that it might not bring any significant improvement at all. While the Atom core itself might be more efficient, it’s less powerful on a clock-per-clock basis so in the Diamondville version, will have to be run at 1.6Ghz. It’s also stripped of some of the power-saving features like speed-stepping. At best, the CPU will save an average 0.5W which in a system that consumes between 10 and 14 watts in-use (idling to about 8W I estimate) will return about a 5% battery life improvement. What I hope we will see is better engineering on the motherboard with more efficient Wifi and power circuitry. Together, it could add up to something a bit more significant but if the shortage of high capacity batteries continues, all these calculations are a waste of time!

Via Liliputing. Source. Blogeee

4 Comments For This Post

  1. PJE says:

    Those numbers are seem almost generated by a random number generator. There seems to be no rule (that I can see) for how bad the 900 is running compared to the 700.

    The only thing I can think is causing the differences is the 900 is running at 900MHz while the 700 is running at 630… On applications when can use the CPU the battery will be drained quickly, but on applications which can use hardware video acceleration (XVID) the CPU is idling and therefore the times are closer.

    Unless I can get 3+ Hours of use with WiFi on I’ll wait for the next iteration.

  2. DavidC1 says:

    Actually, the Celeron M used in the EEE PCs are 7W TDP variants. There’s inherent power savings features in all the Silverthorne-derived CPUs that isn’t turned off that’s not existant in the Celeron M.

    I am sure that the differences will be bigger, but hmm, 1 hour for the EEE is pretty disappointing.

  3. brecklundin says:

    This is the first I have hunted for battery life info on the new Eee’s. I have to say the reports make it a deal break of the first order. I have an HP NX9420 17″ laptop (T7400 C2D) CPU that gets a solid 3.5-4.5 hrs from it’s standard battery with wifi on and active use and about 75-80% brightness. I would have expected at least that sort of life from such a tiny device.

    I guess I will pass on this new generation of UMPC type devices as they are not ready to actually be, well, mobile under real world use conditions.

    Thanks for the info…

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