Intel Core i7 Mobile CPU (Clarksfield) Review

Intel Core i7 Mobile CPU (Clarksfield) Review
Battery Performance

The Clevo W870CU whitebook came with a 3,800mAh, 42.18Wh Li-Polymer battery. Because of the large 17-inch display, powerful processor and GPU, and two fans, we didn't expect a long battery life from the desktop-replacement unit. In fact, the Clevo site indicates that the W870CU should be capable of about 90 minutes of battery life (the unit doesn't actually ship until October).

The whitebook's mere 38 minutes of battery life on the BatteryEater Pro test was very disappointing, to say the least--and even a lot less than the modest time we expected. With less than 40 minutes of battery life, there's not a whole lot you can do with the notebook before it runs out of juice or needs to be plugged back in for charging. It is important to keep in mind, however, that this unit is still considered a pre-production unit, so we can only hope that Clevo has a few tricks up its sleeve in order to eke out another 50 minutes of so from the battery to get the system up to it estimated 90 minutes of battery life.

We also connected the whitebook to a power meter to see how much power it consumes. With the notebook sitting in an idle state (logged into the OS with no active foreground tasks), the whitebook operated at around 44W. When we cranked up the Cinebench R10 multi-threaded workload--with all four physical execution cores active--the unit's power consumption jumped up to about 96W.

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