Do dedicated cards kill battery life?

F

Forealz

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 7, 2007
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I'm trying to find a laptop that has good battery life, lightweight, with a decent gaming card in that order of importance. It seems that every laptop with a good battery comes with a crappy card, and every laptop with a good card has terrible battery life. Why do these features seem to be mutually exclusive?

Anyone have a recommendation for around 15"?
 
Gaming and good battery life dont go hand in hand. Dedicated cards for gaming require more power and produce more heat and thus deplete battery power much faster than an integrated card would. If you want good battery life then your going to have to sacrifice GPU power. If you want to be able to game then you have to sacrifice battery life. You cant have both. One option that sounds like it might be what you want would be a notebook that has nvidia optimus. What optimus does is switch between the integrated card and the dedicated card depending on the current programs requirements. When not running a GPU intensive application, optimus switches from the dedicated card, to the integrated card, to conserve battery life. I am sure that AMD probably has its own implementation of this, however I have never used it, so I have no information about it.
 
They solved this problem several generations ago with switchable graphics. My old thinkpad T400 had onboard intel gpu with a switchable amd radeon discrete gpu.
 
If you want high performance no holds barred graphics, then you can't play on battery for more than 30 minutes give out take with a "laptop" that can use in excess of 100 Watts and has a huge power brick (a real brick may weigh less). Both nvidia & AMD have switchable graphics.

Really depends on intended use.

I've tried a few laptops, and for me the best mix of battery life, gpu & price is an apu by AMD. An A8 or upcoming A10 look nice.

I own an HP dv6 with a crossfire A8 and couldn't be happier working and gaming on the road with it.
 
I was wondering about that. To be fair, when I game on it I will most definitely be plugged into a power supply (as well as when doing photoshop). When on battery I probably won't be doing anything more intense than Word or the internet. So battery life while gaming is irrelevant to me. I'm mainly looking for a more portable machine to replace my desktop, but would still like to be able to attend the occasional lan party.
 
Yeah -- best bet might be to look for something running Nvidia Optimus. It can swap between integrated and discrete automatically depending on your usage. Battery life while gaming will still be mediocre, but otherwise it should be fairly good.
 
If you want a dedicated GPU, you have to compromise. You're probably best off with some NVidia solution, because last time I checked, AMD's drivers sucked. Most current and last generation AMD solutions don't support automated switching between integrated and dedicated graphics when coupled with an Intel chipset (except on Mac OSX, where oddly enough, this works!).
 
/rant/ said:
If you want a dedicated GPU, you have to compromise. You're probably best off with some NVidia solution, because last time I checked, AMD's drivers sucked. Most current and last generation AMD solutions don't support automated switching between integrated and dedicated graphics when coupled with an Intel chipset (except on Mac OSX, where oddly enough, this works!).
Click to expand...

This. Had an amd gpu notebook and it was not so fun. Have an nvidia gpu optimus now, works great and auto switching is nice stuff.
 
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