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Battery and Thermal Testing
Battery Test - Tomb Raider 2013 Battery Rundown
To test battery life, we set each laptop’s battery profile to Balanced while running the 2013 Tomb Raider game's built-in benchmark at the lowest detail preset. The frame rate is locked at 30 FPS through GeForce Experience’s Battery Boost to limit the strain on the battery. Meanwhile, a script running in the background monitors and time stamps the system’s battery percentage. The laptops are set to hibernate once battery levels reach 5%. We test the battery life at 200 nits.
The Acer Nitro 5 contains a 48Wh battery, which is smaller than its competition. However, the i5-8300H and GTX 1050 Ti don’t consume very much power, so the Nitro is capable of over 2 hours of uninterrupted game time.
The other laptops are equipped with larger batteries, but more power hungry components, such as the Inspiron and its Max-Q GTX 1060 or the Sager and its i7-7700HQ.
On our standard web rundown test, which continuously browses the web, runs graphics benchmarks and plays videos at 150 nits, it lasted for 3 hours and 18 minutes.
Thermal Testing
We use our Optris PI 640 infrared camera to measure the laptop’s thermals. To complement our thermal images, we take the average and maximum temperature from GPU-Z’s thermal log. For more information about how we test, check out our Measurement Science article.
Not only does the Nitro 5 exhibit decent battery life, but it also shines is in thermal performance. The i5-8300H and GTX 1050 Ti don’t draw much power and therefore don’t produce much heat. At idle, the GPU heat sink expels 44°C (111°F). After turning up the heat with a 15 minute Furmark test, the GPU heat sink expels around 58°C (136°F). According to our GPU-Z log, the GTX 1050 Ti’s GPU diode ran at around 60°C (140°F) on average and maxed out at 63°C (145°F).
While the Nitro 5 doesn’t top our list as the coolest laptop, it still handles heat really well. All of the systems in this comparison (except the Sager) are in the top of their class in terms of thermal dissipation, and this is due to adequate cooling, low power components, or some mixture of the two.
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