MSI Wind12 U230 Netbook w/ AMD Athlon Neo X2 L335 CPU Review

Battery Life

Battery Life

To test the battery life, we let the computer sit at idle with no screensaver and measured the amount of time it took for it to go into standby mode. In order to get an idea of how long the battery would last under a work load, we played a movie in the same fashion. Normally we use Windows Media Player to playback the DVD, but since the ASUS Eee PC 1005PE runs Windows 7 Starter, DVD playback is disabled. We installed VLC Player in order to test the battery life during DVD Playback on the Eee PC 1005PE. The results are shown in the graph below.

Results: Here we see the MSI Wind U230 lasts just over 4.5 hours at idle. This is very close to what we achieved on the ASUS Eee PC 1201N which uses Intel’s Atom 330 dual core processor. It seems at the surface that the AMD Athlon Neo X2 L335 dual core CPU does not use much more power than its Atom competitor. While playing back a DVD from the hard drive, the 1201N is able to last an extra precious 34 minutes. So it seems the AMD Athlon Neo X2 L335 consumes a bit more power than the Intel Atom 330 when under load.