Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware unboxed today we'll be investigating a couple of questions I often see asked about gaming laptops what's the performance like on battery how long do these laptops last in games and can you extend the life in any way and the less powerful systems last longer I have some great apples to apples data for you in this video so it should be interesting and that is a bit of an FAQ for gaming laptop buyers the reason I say apples to apples is I have a rare opportunity to put two basically identical systems to the test and see how the one main difference the discrete GPU impacts battery life and playability away from the typically necessary wall charger you might have seen the review last week but I have two ASA predator Triton 700 systems in hand right now thanks to ASA and PC case gear the Triton 700 s both have typical laptop hardware like a core i7 7700 HQ CPU a 1080p display and 512 gig SSDs one model has an nvidia geforce gtx 1066 gigabyte while the other has a geforce gtx 1080 max q both use largely the same cooler and other hardware the only difference is in the 1080 max-q model that has 32 gig of ram instead of 16 gig and a high refresh 120 hertz display both systems have batteries approximately 50 watt hours in size which is very small for a gaming laptop so when gaming on battery there are a couple of different performance modes you can choose from an invidious GeForce experience utility the setting in question is called battery boost which when enable limits the performance of games to a frame rate of your choice between 30 and 60 fps the idea here is that you can cap a game previously running at high frame rates to a lower frame rate leading to lower GPU usage and less battery drain for longer gameplay on battery disabling battery Boost runs the game at the maximum performance possible but there's one critical thing to note here even when battery boost is to say you'll never achieve the same level of performance as when plugged in this is down to simple battery physics the battery just can't provide the 180 to 230 watts that the charger provides and even if it could it would likely run at dangerously hot levels and lasts for about 15 minutes so when gaming on battery there is a significant power limit that prevents the same level of performance as when plugged in this explains why no matter what settings you change or tweaks you make you'll never hit those top performance levels to explore just how significant the performance drop is I ran the Triton 700s through our standard laptop GPU benchmarks on battery and compared the results to the plugged in numbers I gathered earlier as you can see in these charts or will be shown in a couple of minutes the performance drop is pretty huge in most games games that were running at 60fps or above now struggle to reach 20 fps and across the board games that were playable on both systems with ultra detail settings are now utterly unplayable when you pull out the charger the average performance dropped for the GTX 1060 was 66.8% in average frame rates and 69% in 1% lows this means that on battery the GTX 1060 model has roughly one third the performance that it has on the charger the GTX 1080 max-q is hit a bit harder with an average drop of 71 percent in average frame rates and 78 percent in 1% lows for around one quarter of a performance it had previously now of course when connected to a charge of the GTX 1080 max-q does hold a significant performance advantage over the GTX 1060 across the games here that lead is around 40% but on battery with a crippling power limit in place that lead is cut and the results are pretty interesting so we're looking at average frame rates the GTX 1080 max-q still holds a performance lead though it's been reduced to 21% on average when on battery but we're looking at 1% low frame rates the average result is within a few percent of the GTX 1060 this leads to some intriguing observations in some situations it appears the texts nad max-q runs more efficiently than the GTX 1060 allowing higher performance under similar power limits which is why the GTX 1080 max Q is still faster than the 1060 on battery and average frame rates however the 1080 max Q model suffers from horrendous stuttering under this power limit in a handful of tiles in particular rise of the Tomb Raider watchdogs too and prey in these games there are regular one to two second periods where the framerate dips to under 5 fps even when you turn down the quality settings to achieve a more playable average framerate on battery the regularity of these pauses suggests the system is struggling under the power limit with small fluctuations in battery output potentially causing the GPU to starve of power for brief moments so while the GTX 1080 max cube can be faster at times on battery in otherwise very similar systems it's the GTX 1060 that delivers more consistent performance on battery without the same stuttering concerns in either case the performance drops are significant enough that you'll have to turn down the coil levels too low in most games just to achieve frame rates above 30 the other question of course is how long do gaming laptops actually last while gaming on battery this is you know it's a difficult question to answer in general considering the wide variety of hardware and battery capacities but we'll first look at some data from the Triton 700 s I tested with and then I'll discuss the situation a bit more generally so the first game I tested with was Mass Effect Andromeda because it scales down nicely and allows you to achieve more than 60 FPS on the lowest settings on battery with these systems this gives us a good idea of how invidious battery Boost technology works to enhance the battery life on their systems with the gtx 1060 system running at full performance I achieved 52 minutes of gaming which is pretty short though not unexpected for a gaming system here the game runs at around 100 fps in the area I tested with and at the lowest settings at 1080p capping the game to 60 FPS using battery boost didn't have a massive effect increasing play time by just 9 minutes for a 17 percent game however the real gains are seen in capping the game to 30fps now the laptop lasted a just shy of twice as long which is a pretty huge gain of course you will have to put up with a console like experience at pretty low detail levels and even then you won't get two hours of life here but it does show the advantage of battery boost on the other hand the gtx 1080 max-q model isn't as affected by a battery boost it achieved her in the same gameplay duration as the 1060 model with battery boost disabled at a slightly higher level of performance however capping the game to 60fps only increased the battery life by 6 percent and capping the 30fps led to just a 26% increase going from a hundred plus FPS to 30fps for just 13 minutes more gameplay in this situation you know it isn't that ideal it's a similar story with watchdogs to hear the game set to 1080p and the low preset achieved around 42 fps in the test area on both systems and it was surprising to discover the 1080 max kumara lasted a good 9 minutes or 23% longer here however when capita 30fps it's the GTX 1060 that outperformed the GTX 1080 by 20% using its efficiency when underutilized to just hit the 60 minute mark the GTX 1080 max Q barely improved in stamina when battery boost was activated despite the performance being reduced by 27% the final game I tested with is civilization 6 which like a lot of strategy games is great for playing on the go with the performance uncapped the gtx 1060 model hovered around 45 fps in a late-game save with everything at the lowest detail level surprisingly it managed to last 65 minutes at this performance and incredibly capping the game to 30fps boosted this result to 108 minutes in other words a 33% reduction in framerate went to a 66% increase in stammerer which is an excellent result from the system and civilization 6 is very playable at a locked 30fps since 6 also lasts longer than normal with the GT externally max q but again it's a title where battery of boosts 30fps cap has no significant impact on battery life in general these battery life figures that quite low and that's a product of the mere 50 watt hour battery inside the Triton 700 many other gaming laptops feature larger batteries in the 75 to 100 watt hour range and those typically last between one and three hours in games yeah that's still not ages but it's a little better than the numbers we've got with the Triton 700 I will say though that if you are planning on utilising battery boost you should also enable vsync as for some reason you get nasty tearing in some games with vsync disables and Nvidia capping the frame rate to 30 fps if you are thinking of buying a gaming laptop use away from the charger based on these tests I'd recommend you don't get something too powerful as you won't be harnessing the extra power and it likely won't last as long compared to a less powerful system the GTX 1060 provides a decent mix of plugged in power and battery stamina when captive 30fps though if you want to do a lot of gaming on battery something like a GTX 1050 or 1050 Ti could be a better option in any situation though don't expect to get a lot of performance out of a system running on battery power if you are interested in more info on the Triton 700 laptops we used for review check out the full review which will have links to that in the description below otherwise I'll catch you next time