Benchmarks: Vitals and Battery Life
The noise meter suggests that Cyberpower's fan configuration is in keeping with most competitors, but the real-world experience doesn't always align with the numbers. We found that even the slightest bit of activity would invoke the fans - meaning the laptop is rarely silent - and when the coolers do get going, they generate a purr that is really quite distracting. It is worth pointing out that our review unit also exhibits noticeable coil whine.
We use a pair of PCMark 10 benchmarks to gauge battery life; Modern Office, which intermittently uses the writing, web browsing and video conferencing workloads from the main PCMark 10 benchmark; 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 purpose-built power plan, wireless radios disabled, and screen brightness set as close to 200 nits as possible using a calibration device.
You would think that newer laptops would lead the way in terms of efficiency, yet with a 94Wh battery under the hood, Cyberpower's Tracer III Evo fares better than most and manages to sustain office workloads for over six-and-a-half hours. Not quite enough to get through a full working day, but not bad, relatively speaking.
