Legit Processor Reviews

ASUS K42F Notebook w/ Intel Core i5 540M Arrandale CPU Review

Manufacturer: Intel
Product: ASUS K42F-B1 14
Date: Sun, Jan 03, 2010 - 11:00 PM
Written By: Nathan Kirsch -
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Battery Life Benchmark

Battery Life

Battery life is hands down the most important feature on notebooks, so before we show you some numbers let's take a look at how we got our battery life numbers.

Battery Life Graph

To test the battery life, we let both notebooks idle in power saver mode with the wireless and all settings turned off until the notebook powered down when Windows 7 reached roughly 7% battery life. This is the point where the system hibernates shortly after you see this much hated pop-up. We took the time the notebook was unplugged to the point in time where the notebook to go into standby mode as the standby time.

Battery Life Graph

In order to get an idea of how long the battery would last under a work load, we played the Blu-ray movie Star Trek in balanced battery mode until the notebook went into hibernation mode again. We also Mobile Mark 2007 to find the battery life by running the productivity suite. The results are shown in the graph below. 

Battery Life Graph

Results: The ASUS K42F notebook is available with a 6-cell and an 8-cell battery depending on how you configure the notebook.  The ASUS 42F notebook that we have for testing has the larger 8-cell battery that is rated at 4400mAh, 63Wh.  The HP DV4-1555dx comes with a 6-cell battery that is rated at 4200mAh, 47Wh. This puts the HP DV4-1555dx at a disadvantage when it comes to battery life as it has two less cells. The HP DV4-1555dx was unable to play the movie Star Trek from start to finish as it is a two hour long movie, which was a complete bummer. The ASUS K42F with the 8-cell battery was able to, but only had about ten minutes to spare. The ASUS K42F with the 8-cell battery is the way to go if you had to pick between the 8-cell and 6-cell models.  Battery life on the more energy efficient 'Arrandale' system was hands down better on the idle and Mobile Mark 2007 tests regardless of the extra cells thanks to the lower platform power consumption.

Next Page - Final Thoughts and Conclusions


Review Index
Page 1 - Core i5 540M and ASUS K42F
Page 2 - 2010 Intel HD Graphics
Page 3 - The ASUS K42F 14-inch Notebook
Page 4 - Test Setup
Page 5 - Core i5 540M CPU-Z
Page 6 - SiSoftware Sandra 2010c
Page 7 - x264 HD Encoding
Page 8 - Sony Vegas 9.0C Pro
Page 9 - POV-Ray 3.7 Beta 34
Page 10 - Cinebench R10
Page 11 - PCMark Vantage
Page 12 - 3DMark Vantage
Page 13 - Spore - Game Testing
Page 14 - Blu-ray Video Playback
Page 15 - Power Consumption
Page 16 - Battery Life Benchmark
Page 17 - Final Thoughts and Conclusions