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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%. We test the battery life twice: at the laptop’s maximum brightness and at 200 nits.
The previously tested Sager NP8156 offers great performance, but we were unimpressed with its meager one hour and 30 minutes of battery life. Sager’s second offering delivers much more battery life, exceeding the Acer Predator 17 by five minutes and coming a few minutes shy of two hours. This should be more than enough life to last you through a short flight or commute, and we found that most of the laptops we've tested fall within this range. Still, nothing comes close to beating the Dell Inspiron 15 7000, the crowned king of battery-powered gaming. Naturally, both the Dell and our subject Sager are using lesser (and less hungry) components.
Thermal Testing
We use the Optris PI 640 infrared camera to measure the laptop’s thermal characteristics. For more information about how we test, be sure to check out our Measurement Science article.
The Sager NP6852 surprised us with its idle temperatures; the CPU and its associated cooler lingers around 44°C, which is normal, but the GPU hovers around a chilly 32°C. Our hopes were quickly dashed, because as soon as we raised the temperature with a 15 minute Furmark test, the GPU’s temperatures skyrocketed far past an acceptable range: 105°C. Our AIDA64 log confirms this absurd temperature, with an average of 92.6°C and a maximum of 100°C for the GPU. We witnessed similar issues with the NP8165, albeit with the CPU’s temperatures.
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.
The NP6852 exhibits excellent white luminance at 0% brightness, but the black luminance is too high, which diminishes the contrast to a mediocre 622.7:1. Similarly, at maximum brightness the white luminance is adequately high and the black luminance isn’t low enough, resulting in a contrast ratio of 624.7:1. We're looking for something closer to 1000:1, and instead we’re treated to a flat looking image. The NP8165 delivers much better contrast.
The NP6852’s RGB balance is a different story. Almost across the board, the RGB levels stay close to 100%, with green levels rising slightly above 100% and red levels dipping slightly below. The NP6852 has the most balanced RGB levels out of all the laptop displays we've tested so far.
The average gamma point stays pretty close to the 2.2 we aim for, floating above 2.2 and surpassing 2.4 between 0% and 40% brightness, and slipping beneath 2.2 from 40%-80%.
Despite this system's excellent RGB balance, that doesn’t translate into low average color errors. We have yet to find a laptop with a low color error average. However, the NP6852’s grayscale accuracy is spot on. Values above 2.5 become visible to the human eye, and this laptop is the first to perform so well on this particular metric.
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