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Battery, Thermal, And Display Testing
Battery Test - Tomb Raider 2013 Battery Rundown
To test battery life, we set each laptop’s battery profile to Balanced while running Tomb Raider’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%.
Out of all of the laptops included in this review, the Asus Strix GL702VM delivers the longest battery life. Sitting at above 2 hours, the Strix 17 would be an ideal machine to bring on brief road trips and flights. The Gigabyte P37X v6 delivers about 20 minutes less game time on battery, which might make all the difference if you want to win a lengthy boss battle in a limited amount of time.
Thermal Testing
For our thermal testing, we used our Optris PI 640 infrared camera to measure the laptop’s thermals. For more information about how we test, be sure to check out our Measurement Science article.
At idle, the heatsink and heat pipe temperatures all hover around 45.4°C. This isn’t anything to be worried about, but it’s still rather high for an idling temperature. When we run Furmark for 15 minutes, the heat increases considerably to around 75°C, with the GPU heatsink experiencing the most heat at 77.6°C. Sure enough, our Aida64 thermal log reports a GPU diode average of temperature of 74.8°C and a maximum temperature of 77°C. This isn’t a dangerously high temperature by any means, but considering how well its 15" counterpart performed, the thermal performance here is disappointing.
Display Testing
We used the SpectraCal C6 Colorimeter to measure the P37X v6’s display. Be sure to check out our Display Testing Explained article for a full description of our test methodology.
Just like the Strix 15 we reviewed before, the Strix 17 has excellent contrast at both 0% and 100% brightness levels. In particular, the GL702VM has impressive white luminance; its largest issue is the lackluster black luminance. If the black levels were lower, the Strix 17’s overall contrast could easily muster a 1000:1 ratio, which is what we'd like to see. It's still not a bad result.
The Strix 17’s RGB levels start off relatively balanced, although green levels start to plummet once brightness is raised beyond 30%. Red and blue levels also rise, with blue in particular rising at 100% brightness.
The average gamma averages around 2.12; the CalMAN charts illustrate the gamma point dipping at around 25% brightness and only recovers to 2.2 once the brightness reaches 100%. The grayscale and overall average color differences are also greater than the other three laptops we tested. This means that color errors will most easily be spotted on the Strix 17’s display. Considering that this is a G-Sync display, it’s a shame that more accurate color reproduction doesn’t go hand in hand with the smooth gaming performance this laptop can offer.