ASUS G73Jh DX11 Gaming Notebook Review – ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870

Battery Life, Temperatures and Power Consumption

Battery Life

For our idle battery test, we let the system sit on the desktop with no applications running. For the DVD test, we ran a ripped DVD off the hard drive in Windows Media Player in a loop. The time given is the time it takes a fully charged battery to deplete and the system automatically goes into standby mode.

Result: Being as we are looking at a gaming notebook with an ATI Radeon HD 5870 GPU, we did not expect a lot out of the battery life. However, we are always of the school of thought that when having a portable system, it would be nice to at least be able to watch a two hour movie and the ASUS G73Jh did not deliver there. Gaming while unplugged is obviously not expected to last long.

Temperatures

Our temperature readings were all taken with an infrared thermometer in Fahrenheit (F) while the system was idle and running a loop of 3DMark06 and wPrime for the load temps.

Idle Temps

Load Temps

With a flagship AMD Radeon 5870 GPU on board, there is no doubt that this laptop runs on the warm side. I was able to have the notebook sit on my lap without too much of a heat issue on my legs, but that is not a good solution for the notebook’s air flow.

We did notice the bottom of the chassis warmed up a bit at load, but only where you would expect the hot-spots to be. The CPU and GPU were getting a little warm, but not too hot. We even noticed some areas away from major components got cooler at load due to the cooling fan running at higher RPMs. One thing to note is that there was very little temperature difference on either side of the trackpad since the only spaces below the front of the notebook are for hard drives.

Power Consumption

Battery & Idle
Idle with no battery	53W
Idle with battery	86W
Idle Frequency	1.6GHz
Load
Max Consumption with no battery	122W
Max Frequency	2.8GHz

Here we see the ASUS G73Jh has an idle consumption of 53W without the battery installed. With the battery charging, the system consumes an extra 33W! So when the G73Jh is charging at idle, roughly 38% of the power consumption is just for charging the 8-cell battery!

We also see a big difference between idle and load power consumption which goes to show how the CPU and GPU power saving features really help conserve power when not in use. Now if only we could get over two hours of battery life in order to watch a DVD on the road without needing to be plugged in to a power inverter.