Samsung NC10 test report (2): the Ultimate Battery Life Testing
Text/Photo: odinchong
How long will the battery life of NC10, the long live the netbook, be endurance?
Thanks for Samsung PR company lending us NC10 to test again.
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Why can NC10 be so endurance? Rumor has it that it is being tested under Power Saving mode so it cannot endure 4-5 hours under full-speed; or because of high pressure but vulnerable battery that NC10 has long battery life...
Actually, I have test NC10 12 times within one week. The longest period is 8 hours and the shortest is near 5 hours – owing to the dim screen function, there are 4 tests certified as fail and waste me for 20 hours. After these tests, I have found some power-saving setting of NC10 and try to isolate these setting for testing its real battery life:
1. Dim screen: Even LED backlit provide much brightness but less consumption screen, laptopmag.com proves that it is the most high consumption parts in NC10. Thus, it's Battery Management software managed to dim the screen down by numerous hiding setting that when you visit your toilet for only 1 min, and then you will find your screen is become a black blank pages -- that's why I have 4 failure tests.
2. Atom's Speedstep technology: no matter what mode, Battery Manager are trying to use Speedstep that down tune your 1.6 GHZ CPU to 800 MHZ until workload become higher. If you really need a longer battery life, you may change it to Speed Mode that Speedstep will lock the frequency under 800 MHZ even workload become higher.
3. Bios: Bios has a power-saving setting and signed as: disable to make computer response a little bit quicker but consume a little bit power. I am not sure whether it relates to the lower 5w voltage of motherboard which mentioned by umpcportal.com, but actually, I cannot find any different, neither practical nor benchmark test, when I disable it.
Notice: all the results are tested in a Wifi-on situation.
Web Surfing Test
Laptopmag.com had failure to obtain a 7:34 result because of the dim screen, too. However, I have obtain a 8:01 result without a dim screen last week.
（Speed Mode, 37.5% Brightness, firefox, Chrome and IE opened with umpcfever.com
Unfortunately, I have found that when I visit simple website, just like umpcfever.com which CPU usage become as low as 2-5%, NC10's Speedstep will down tune the Atom from 1.6 GHZ to 800 MHZ and even I have set it to Speed Mode.
Nevetheless, when I visit some pages which are full of flash or Javascript and cause a much more CPU usage as higher as 25-60%, Speedstep will tune the CPU up to 1.6 GHZ – it alleviate the power consumption at all. How much power it save? You may see the VID(Voltage Identification Digital) and find what is the difference.
Thus, the last 8 hours result could only be realized in web novels or forums. How about the real web-surfing result?
I have written a simple web pages combination, including flash video, flash 3-D animation and some dark and bright blank pages and redirect circularly each 3 minutes, and the time of surfing is nearly 2(flash) to 1 (blank). I hope it can help us to find out the real power consumption of NC10 – NC10 will surf these pages in Speed Mode (mute) and try to keep its CPU usage much higher. By the monitoring of CPU-Z, Atom usually kept in 1.6 GHZ when web surfing.
Okay fine, let find full-speed NC10 can endure 8 hours or just 5 hours as many other guess.
(Speed Mode, 37.5% brightness, mute, 2/3 Flash Web Surfing)
Right, 6:12. NC10's battery life is still better than many others thought. In laptopmag.com's record, the 2nd place MSI Wind U100 is only 5:13. Actually, my Eee PC 901 could only achieve 5 hours with Super Performance Mode even I have not intent to visit flash-based website -- Okay, 6 hours if I change to Power Saving Mode.
However, it really deducted 2 hours at all.
I try to disable the Power-saving function of Bios, what will happen?
I am trying to use a less consumption setting than laptopmag.com (16 bit colour VS 32 bit colour). Nevertheless, compare to laptopmag.com's open-and-close testing software, I have found that surfing in flash web may be much power-consuming.
Full Loading Test
Then, there is the full-speed test with Battery Eater's Classic Mode (high workload test). The result in last week is 4:46.
(37.5% Brightness, Classic test, Speed Mode)
laptopmag.com has tested that LED backlit is the most essential factor to save the battery life, but they have only test the low-loading situation. Thus, I am trying to test the higher loading saturation with 80% brightness. Oh, 4:42, LED backlit seems not so much effect on the battery life when it is in higher workload. (Perhaps Battery Eater's dark background may help the screen to alleviate its power-consumption.)
(80% Brightness, Classic Test, Speed Mode)
Following, I disable the Bios' power saving function. The result is...unbelievable, 5:01. Right, it is longer and too long to break through the 5 hours ceiling of netbook's full-speed record in Battery Eater's Classic Mode.
I am not sure why disable it will provide longer battery life, so I guess that NC10's battery is not quite stable at all. Anyway, I regretted that I have not enough time to test its Silent Mode with Battery Eater's Classic Mode.
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I have spent almost 70 hours for these tests, what are the consequences?
(1) When I was using NC10 to web-surfing, there is only 35 min different between Speed Mode and Silent Mode, but there is almost 2 hours different when I was visiting flash-based web. Hence, how many battery life your netbook has not only according to your machine, but also according to what pages you are visiting, and what script the designer writes. In order to protect your battery, to protect our earth, Web designer, please, alleviate your flash work, and user, please, install No Script or Adblock in your Firefox.
(2) Our best record is 6:46 – which the longest record in Netbook – even Speed Mode's 6:12 is still unreachable for many other Netbook's power-saving mode. On the other hand, we seldom stay stun in a flash website for more than 4 hours, so I believe that NC10 can endure beyond 7 hours with the understanding of (1) – even in full-speed.
(3) Netbook user should know that Atom's performance is just meet the edge of playing complicated flash video and 3-D animation – if we are using power-saving mode? The flash will become too lag to be a chip of video. Indeed, when we found that NC10's Speed mode's battery life is only a little bit shorter than Silent mode, why don't we use full speed to web-surfing?
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Not only Power-Saving Setting, but also full-speed setting, NC10 still reach a unreachable standard of Netbook's battery life. How can it be? I hope I can find the answer later on.
Re: Samsung NC10 test report (2): the Ultimate Battery Life Testing
December 12, 2008 by tsog • • •
interesting results
seems like atom can be quite a power saver
looks like you changed the resolution between a few of the tests. could this have influenced your results?
keep up the good work
Reply
Re: Samsung NC10 test report (2): the Ultimate Battery Life Testing
December 12, 2008 by odinchong • • •
Never have I changed the Windows resolution but changed the resolution of BATTERY EATER ONLY mainly because 800 X 600 of Battery Eater screen is much easier to monitor with CPU-Z.
(Yes, the picture of a floating battery in 1024 x 600 is disturbing me.)
Besides, only one of my test down tune the windows screen to 16 bit because of testing the most saving way.
Re: Samsung NC10 test report (2): the Ultimate Battery Life Testing
February 4, 2009 by Anonymous • • •
Thank you very much for your informative review. I have now bought this computer and love it!
Reply
Re: Samsung NC10 test report (2): the Ultimate Battery Life Testing
February 16, 2009 by owen • • •
i find the 7800mah 9 cell samsung nc10 nd10 battery in the website:
http://www.global-laptop-batteries.com/samsung-laptop-battery/9-cell-Samsung-NC10-KA04-battery.html
