Energy, Efficiency, And Battery Life
The use of a desktop processor is certain to hurt the X7200’s power consumption, though increased performance could help its efficiency.
A single graphics card helps the X8100/GeForce GTX 480M combination place first in power consumption, while a desktop processor hurts the X7200 by more than many people might have thought. Let’s see how these stack up in performance.
Using the CrossFire-equipped M17x as our high-end graphics baseline, we see that the single-GPU GeForce GTX 480M falls far behind, while the dual-GPU GeForce GTX 460M SLI setup surges ahead. Remember that, at the beginning of this article, we pointed out that the computational power of the 480M exceeds that of the 460M by only 15%, so this outcome is no surprise.
Dividing performance by power gives us an efficiency baseline of 100%. Since no electronic device is 100% efficient, we subtracted the baseline from all scores to focus only on the efficiency difference. The Core i7-940XM’s low 55 W TDP puts the X8100 in the lead here, while the Core i7-950’s super-high 130 W TDP drops AVADirect’s X7200 to the bottom of our efficiency chart. The processors have such vastly different power specifications that any reasonably-accurate assessment of graphics efficiency is impossible.
The X8100’s lower energy use is also seen in its superior battery life, which makes any of these notebooks capable of doing a few “notebook things” on-the-go. Of course you’ll need a wall outlet for high-end games, but any of these gaming notebooks is still at least 300% more portable than a similarly-capable desktop gaming system.
