Real World Battery Life
In our DVD playback testing, we used "The Patriot" as our test DVD. Many things can affect battery performance. We prefer to think of these numbers as an informal test rather than something more that that. We know from your feedback that this continues to be an important consideration in the purchase of many laptops, but many things can effect the outcome of this test. The time of 1 hour and 53 minutes that was turned in by our test system was still a little short of what we expected.
Currently, if you want the maximum DVD playback time, at least for right now, you are better off sticking with a Pentium IIIm based system. We would have expected PowerMizer to make more of a difference in this test as well, but after speaking with NVIDIA we learned that during their studies they have found that users were more interested in quality than battery life. We find this quite puzzling beause most of our readers tell us the exact opposite -- which is to say, that they would rather have additional battery life. The fact that NVIDIA is focused on playback quality does answer the question of why performance wasn't better, but we still would have liked to have the option to try to increase battery life.
At this point there is no doubt that ATI does have an edge in DVD playback battery life performance. We would like to see NVIDIA focus on improving the length of playback time, because otherwise we are going to have to learn to only watch movies that are 1:45 long, or make sure that we have a second battery in our C-Bay, which is only going to make our shoulders more sore. Given the performance of the unit in our BWS BatteryMark 1.0 test, could any additional optimizations or improvements be made to current DVD-ROM drives in notebooks so that they would use less power? This might be one key in improving notebook performace on this test.