Hello everybody out there,
I am going through the fun yet tedious task of selecting the purchase of a laptop I need for my new study.
The college I am going to recommends a battery life of at least 4 hours under full load (programming)
And I was wondering is there a standard for battery life? and what type of battery should the laptop have?
Should the laptop have 6 or more cells?
Thanks in advance!
4 hours under full load? What kind of miracle batteries are we talking about here? I mean, my laptop lasts about 45 minutes under full load (of course it does have a sandy bridge i5 and a fermi Nvidia gpu). I guess the newer laptops might last longer, but getting one that has a large battery is going to be a challenge, since small batteries seem to be in fashion nowadays (for god knows why). I would say look for a laptop with the largest battery you can find, and a low TDP processor so that you don't need to waste as much power cooling it. That would give you max battery life under load.
A rough calculation would be to take the mAh rating of the battery and multiplying the value by the battery voltage and 1000 to get the Wh value. Then divide that value by the power (number of watts) that the laptop will use under full load. Worst case scenario is to use the Processor and GPU TDPs as well as the maximum power usage of all of the other components (i.e. screen, wireless card, etc...) for the power.
This method is a bit complicated though and it would be much easier to just look at a review online.