The MSI Wind seems to be doing the UK rounds at the moment and I’ve just been looking at the VR-Zone review. Its nice to see the internals (really!) and I’m really impressed with the silky black version. However, their power drain testing is somewhat strange. They’ve measured the power drain at the mains outlet and then used that to calculate what the device will draw when on battery.
What they should have done is measured the current and voltage after the AC adaptor because those little blighters usually add 30% to the power requirement. If they’d done that, they probably would have seen a minimum power drain closer to 7W rather than 9.8W. Based on other devices I’ve tested, that would return an average 10W drain in normal use. Given an average capacity netbook battery , that would give a usable 3 hours of battery life but there’s a little surprise on the Wind battery. MSI are using a relatively small 3-cell battery with just 24wh of power which is 25% less capacity than the smallest Eee PC battery. Expect no more than 2.5 hours out of the Wind in normal wifi-on use and close to 2hrs if you’re pushing it. Oh well, at least’s it’s better than the 1hr 15mins that VR-Zone predicted.
May 30th, 2008 at 3:09 am
You’ve seen Crave’s coverage. Off of AC, the CPU goes into 50% of max run speed mode and the screen dims.
I didn’t know the Atom needed such tricks to claim its longer battery life. Life and learn!
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May 30th, 2008 at 6:15 am
With an Atom based unit, the power problem has pretty much shifted from the CPU to other components like the screen, HD, wireless radios and even the NB/SB/GPU!
Intel has started selling a Diamondville Mini-ITX board and I was surprised to see that the massive heatsink was not for the Atom CPU but was instead sitting on top of the NB.
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May 30th, 2008 at 11:34 am
@Mike: I didn’t observe that 50% drop in CPU speed. I ran SuperPI while purely on battery power and I was able to get a timing that would indicate that the Atom was at its full 1.6Ghz. The 2M timing I got was 3:30.
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May 30th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
doody: Hm. Then what was Crave talking about?!
I also mentioned that in my own blog post too:
http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/wherein-i-threaten-msi/
Maybe you should swing by with an URL to your tests?
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