Battery life, AC draw, and charging speed
Battery
life
Battery life is the general capacity of the
power source (in WH) divided by the power used. The GX60 has an 87Wh battery,
so an average 15W load creates nearly six hours of longevity. Increasing
consumption to only 5W is going to drop down to an hour of use. At its peak
power-consuming scenario of 79W, you will only have slightly more than an hour
of runtime when not plugged into AC power. In return for that major change, the
machine does not throttle down like the other laptops. It is up to you whether
you want to maximize runtime or performance, depending on what you're doing.
Battery
life
With the display at minimum brightness level,
Wi-Fi off, and Windows 7 set to the "Power saver" mode, the GX60 uses
11,067W. This is the lowest possible power, but with the screen is reduced, it
is not ideal for daytime viewing. Increasing screen brightness to 50% uses the
power of 12.34W, while the maximum brightness uses 14.7W. Switching on the
Wi-Fi card adds nearly 1W to any of these numbers.
Browsing the web with Wi-Fi on boosts the
power usage at 50% brightness from 13.1W to 15.4W on simple websites, and from
15.9W to 17W on websites with numerous ads or Flash. The average power usage
during 30 minutes of web browsing is 16W. Viewing 480p videos on YouTube uses
21.8W, while 1,080p video uses 22,995W. At full load, the CPU uses 43W, with
the GPU using 59W. The maximum increase of power use for the system generates
79W / h.
The
chart shows the expected battery life for many of the usage scenarios.
Typing notes on the GX60 for six hours or
more will not have any problems. Even when adding web browsing, you will still
see approximately six hours, as long as the Radeon HD 7970M is not enabled.
Please wait for about three hours of playback on battery power while viewing
streaming video, standard-definition content (480p) might even play for up to
four hours. From one hour to 90 minutes of playing games is a reasonable period
of time to expect when using the Radeon HD 7970M. The built-in GPU on AMD’s
A10-4600M is faster than Intel’s HD Graphics 3000 machine, so make sure that
you could probably have 3 hours of play in a game that did not require heavy
graphics like Civilization V by using the A10, while you would struggle to have
playable performance from an Intel-based computer when utilizing on-die
graphics.
In a month of use, our typical battery life
lasted about from five to six hours.
AC
Power and charge speed
AC
Power and charge speed
Charging the battery with the system off
will use 60W from the socket, while running idle in Windows with the battery
that is fully charged uses 22W. The charge speed is 29W/h with Windows running,
utilizing the total power up to 80W
Fully loading the GPU will use 162W from
the socket while APU uses 69W with Turbo Core enabled and about 58W when Turbo
Core is not used. Remember that each of these measurements also includes the
other parts in the system, such as chipset, screen, Wi-Fi and drives. Running
the tests for numerous games, the power used varies between 114W and 171W.
Fully loading the system draws 171W, with the highest level of 180W when the
APU’s Turbo Core is enabled.
Under full load on the APU or GPU, the
charge speed is still at 44W/h. Only when the CPU and GPU are fully loaded,
does the charge speed decrease to 8.87W/h. There is no major difference in the
charge speeds when the system is on until the system is fully used. Even after
taking the efficiency losses in the power adapter into consideration, the
battery still charges more rapidly when the machine is still not on.
Storage and audio performance
Storage
performance
Storage
performance
Our GX60 test unit is configured with two
SanDisk SDSA5DK-064G 64 GB mSATA SSDs in RAID 0 for the main system drive. It
also holds a Western Digital WD7500BPKT-22PK4 750GB 7,200 RPM hard drive for a
secondary storage.
Running a quick benchmark with
CrystalDiskMark, the RAID 0 SSD array attains read speeds as fast as most of
the best-quality 2.5-inch SSDs on the market. However, the write speeds are not
so great, what we may expect from the 64GB storages. Observing the results
purely from a gaming point of view, performance will be good because most games
require reading files.
Running CrystalDiskMark on the 750 GB hard
drive gives predictable results.
In general, the performance of the GX60
repository is perfect in daily use. The machine is fast and starts up very
rapidly. The SSDs would give better results if they were larger, although
naturally that would cause its price to rise.
Audio
performance
Sound that is transmitted to the external
amplifiers via the analog headphone jack or digital HDMI port sounds pretty
good. We did not encounter any problems when connecting to a digital receiver
or multiple televisions throughout HDMI. We did not hear any noise when playing
music through the analog output.
The built-in speakers of GX60 are very
excellent. In fact, it is one of the best speakers we've ever heard on a laptop.
They deliver a great stereo image and tonal range, enhancing the ability of
GX60’s gaming. While the subwoofer on the bottom of the GX60 might be small, it
still gets the job done well in the lower frequencies.
The
built-in speakers of GX60 are very excellent.
We listened to music via the headphone jack
with some suites of the IEM headsets. Through the extremely sensitive Etymotic
HF3 in-ear earphones, we did not hear any noise and music playback sounded very
good. Through the slightly bass-heavy Bowers and Wilkins C5 in-ear
earphones, the sound was also good, as was listening with the Shure SE425
in-ear earphones.
We
listened to music via the headphone jack with some suites of the IEM headsets.
We also had the two pairs of traditional
over-the-ear headphones to listen. The 32-ohm Grado SR125s sounded good and the
GX60 was able to control them without having any issues. With the Sennheiser
HD600, the GX60 did what most of the laptops could not. The headphone-out
made the 300-ohm load sound pretty loud. The sound through the HD600s was a bit
mid/bass-heavy and not as vivid and detailed as the dedicated headphone
amplifiers, but they still sounded fine.
The GX60 will not have any problems that
control any gaming headset.
