Its well-known by now that the Samsung Q1b out-performs other versions of the Q1 in battery life tests. jkOnTheRun did a Battery Eater test not long back which proved without any question that the VIA-based device wins on battery life. They also gave some figures from Notebook Hardware Control which I thought I’d expand on today in a bit more detail.
I have the two devices in front of me now (both 1GB RAM, 60GB drive) and have run them both through 6 tests designed to highlight some differences. There are a few synthetic tests, some real-world tests and a screen test. Here are power drain results:
| Q1b | Q1p | ||
| Test1 – Background power | 4.8w | 8w | |
| Test2 – Video | 7.4w | 10.8w | |
| Test3 – Audio | 6w | 8.6w | |
| Test4 – Browsing | 9w | 10.7w | |
| Test 5 – Max | 14w | 18w | |
| Test 6 – Screen | 2.5w | 2.6w |
It’s quite clear that the VIA based device wins over the Intel one and the result I find most interesting is that from Test1. After removing as many variables as possible, the Intel platform takes a massive 65% more power. It gives us some idea of how much power the Intel chipset and GPU requires just to tick over. If we add the screen and start surfing, the difference narrows considerably. Under normal conditions, the Intel device is taking around 20% more power. You need to be careful with the Intel device too because if you let it rip it will drain a huge 18W of battery power!
Test1 – WiFi off, backlight off, CPU in sleep state, BT off, HDD inactive.
Test2 – Video watching (2mbps divx, GOMPlayer), Night brightness (2 bars), max battery settings.
Test3 – Audio playback (GOMPlayer):Screen backlight off. All radios off. Max battery settings.
Test4 – Web Browsing. 50% brightness, WiFi on. Result taken over 10-20 logged measurements (seconds)
Test5 – Max power settings, WiFi on, max screen, Bluetooth on, HSDPA on (Q1b only) 100% WMV HD video playback: 100%load
Test6 – Screen variance between min and max settings. Taken at various times. Averaged.
I didn’t just run these tests to prove a VIA vs Intel point. The idea is that I have some benchmarks to refer to when we start to get results from UMPCs running on the UMP 2007 (McCaslin) platform. I expect to see test1 results drop down by at least 1W, maybe 2W. The screen results on the Q1 Ultra should be much better than 2.5W too. I’m hoping for 1-1.5W reduction in those numbers.
For further analysis on the McCaslin platform battery life improvements, take a look at this report where I estimated that the average drain rate would be around 20-25% less than the current platform. If I’m right, it would bring it right in line with VIA’s platform thus taking away one of their advantages. The VIA Technical Forum is under 2 weeks away and VIA have already highlighted this as an Ultra Mobility event. It will be interesting to see what their counter attack is.
