Benchmarks: Power Draw and Battery Life
Our standard battery test entails looping a high-definition movie clip with 50 per cent screen brightness, flight mode enabled and Windows 10 set to its default balanced power profile. In this scenario the Aero 15X reverts to IGP, negating any benefit of the Max-Q GPU, so how has the laptop managed to keep going for an hour-and-a-half longer than the Aero 15?
Turns out the non-clean install of Windows 10 also extends to power profiles. By default, Gigabyte limits CPU frequency to 2.8GHz (down from 3.8GHz) when using the balanced profile, and this is further limited to 50 per cent when running on battery. Such shenanigans bode well for battery benchmarks, but the 1.4GHz top-speed explains why our PiFast score tumbled to a woeful 47.4 seconds when away from the mains.
