Benchmarks: Power Draw and Battery Life
Proving itself an all-round performer, the Aero 17 also puts in a solid showing in our standard battery test. With brightness set to 50 per cent, the laptop was able to loop a high-definition video clip for almost nine hours.
Looking ahead, we're in the process of changing our testing methodology to incorporate the new PCMark 10 Battery Profile benchmarks. Three tests will be used; Office, which intermittently uses the writing, web browsing and video conferencing workloads from the main PCMark 10 benchmark; Video, which loops a 1080p full-screen movie file for the duration; and Gaming, which uses the common Fire Strike test to stress the GPU until the battery is drained.
In order to make the results comparable between laptops, each system is configured with a balanced power plan, wireless radios disabled, and screen brightness set as close to 120cd/m2 as possible using a calibration device.
Battery life comes as a pleasant surprise, and even more so when you consider that Gigabyte is driving a 17.3in 4K panel using the same 94Wh battery as the Aero 15. Optimisations have clearly been made and getting through a full working day ought to be achievable.
