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Intel Pine Trail Explored with ASUS Eee PC 1005PE

By Aloysius Low - 28 Jan 2010

Battery Life and Portability Index

Battery Life

With all the talk about power savings and an all-day battery life, it would seem likely that the ASUS Eee PC 1005PE would blow our minds away when it came to battery performance thanks to the new Intel Atom platform and ASUS has claimed up to 14 hours of battery life on a single charge. This of course, is achieved via using the ASUS Super Hybrid Engine function, which cuts down on clock speeds and screen brightness to save energy. However, since our testing method is pretty much a fixed formula involving 50 per cent screen brightness and sound while looping a 480p video clip till the unit dies with WiFi turned off, we're expecting the unit to last at least four hours. Take note this is without any vendor specific power saving functions like the Super Hybrid Engine, which might actually degrade video performance as we've found out before.

The ASUS Eee PC 1005PE is powered by a 10.8V, 4400mAh battery.

The result? Well, close to six hours at 5 hours 46 minutes to be exact. This means if you're watching a two-hour DVD quality movie on your netbook, you'll be able to watch almost thrice! If you're performing productivity stuff with WiFi turned on, you could probably stretch it to say about seven hours or more depending on what tasks you are doing. Factor in the power consumption figures and you'll realize that Pine Trail really does offer power savings.

While the previous Intel Atom N280's processor is rated at 2.5W TDP and the newer Intel Atom N450 at 8W TDP, bear in mind that the older Intel Atom N280 had to rely on the Intel 945GSE chipset with its maximum 11.8W TDP (and that's not inclusive of yet another old ICH7M companion chip). Accordingly, the older machines do use more power, as reflected on our power consumption figures, but on the newer ASUS Eee PC 1005PE, the Intel Atom N450's 8W TDP is pretty much accurate based on our calculations and reflects well on the new platform. Note also that while the Toshiba NB200 had a longer battery life in our tests, this was achieved on a larger capacity 5800mAh battery, while the 1005PE uses a smaller 4400mAh battery.

On our Portability Index test, which is a simple formula whereby battery uptime gets divided by the product of the unit's weight and volume, the lower the score, the less portable the unit is. The result as indicated by the long bar, shows a very portable unit and is pretty much what you can expect from a netbook, especially one with the new Intel Atom N450 chip.

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