Celeron M Battery Life?

[Crism]

Hey I'm looking into buying a laptop soon. The only decent ones in my price range are Celeron M's. I was wondering how the battery life of these compares the the 3hr+ of the Centrino. Also, how do they compare up performance wise?

Crism

 

[Hacp]

Very bad. I think it would be about half the Pentium M. If your price range is 750, then check out the dell 750 off 1500 coupon at the hot deals forums.

 

[The Pentium Guy]

Bah. CM sucks. PM > CM. PM's performance level was excellent (esp. on a desktop platform, where it beats some of the higher end AMD models).

-TPG

 

[gsellis]

It is as good as any marketing adds to technology. The best battery life I have seen was on a Transmeta tablet, but it was so darn slow... And still, that was about 5 hours of limited use (they said it would go all the way to 8 hours.*)

Without adding a second battery, I have not seen any laptop last too much longer than DVD movie. 😀 Actually, the gain may be from upping to a 9 cell vs 6 cell battery.

* - Got this quote from Autoweek in about 1980 when they were talking about how great electric cars would be in the next 10 years. "There are liars, damn liars, and battery engineers."

So, Centrino might gain you something, but it boils down more to the battery and the hardware implementation than anything else. Remember that Centrino is not just the processor. To be Centrino, it must also have the Intel wireless NIC implementation, which will definately reduce battery life while on.

 

[hurtstotalktoyou]

I'm pretty sure it varies according to the models you compare. For example, I bet the Celeron M 383 has a longer battery life than the Pentium M 715

 

[Accord99]

Originally posted by: Crism
Hey I'm looking into buying a laptop soon. The only decent ones in my price range are Celeron M's. I was wondering how the battery life of these compares the the 3hr+ of the Centrino. Also, how do they compare up performance wise?

Crism

Somewhat worse under light usage, probably an extra 2W. A typical P-M laptop uses ~10-15W at idle. At high CPU usage, the Celeron M should be a bit better. With a 6 cell 53WHr battery, a typical Celeron M laptop should still easily get 3+ hours.

 

[Valkerie]

Pentium M is basically the same as a Celeron M. It's really how the manufacturers would want their target market to go towards. Keep in mind, that M means mobile, so it was built specifically for mobility. CPU's without the M will drain much more battery life. However, I'd say, like almost everyone else has said, it's really the laptop itself that determines a more part of it.

Centrino is for wireless notebooks.

 

[gsellis]

Just as a comparison, I can record about 20 minutes of DV video onto my set, edit it, and create a VBR (dual pass) DVD that is about 15 minutes long on one battery (6 cell?). The laptop is a HP Pavillion 6010 with an AMD A64 3200+. I would guess that is about 2+ hours with a very busy processor and HDD along with a 6 minute DVD burn. That leaves the charge at about 10%.

 

[PsYcHoCoW]

My Acer Centrino notebook lasts for 5 hours (from a full charge) if I let it downclock (downclocked processor is still sufficient for surfing and stuff), as advertised. I use the stock 60W Li-Ion battery. My notebook gives me the option of buying a secondary battery, should I ever need it.

The difference is the Celeron M's I've seen (which are from Acer as well) came with a ~32W battery, and were advertised to last from 2 to 3 hours.

2 to 3 hours is quite a lot of time already. Performance-wise, I know that my Pentium M is very solid - at 1.8GHz and with 1GB of DDR333, I used it all the time for like a month before the parts of my new computer arrived, and I never suffered of poor performance. I think a Celeron M should be enough for smallish uses, such as web surfing, typing out documents and stuff and being able to keep in touch with stuff as you travel, but it won't be a full desktop replacement if you play games and do lots of intensive work on it.

I think you can expect performance similar from the Celeron M to that of a powerful P3.

 

[Fox5]

Originally posted by: Crism
Hey I'm looking into buying a laptop soon. The only decent ones in my price range are Celeron M's. I was wondering how the battery life of these compares the the 3hr+ of the Centrino. Also, how do they compare up performance wise?

Crism

HP has Sempron/Turion based laptops in the same price range.

Celeron M's don't have the power saving features of the Pentium M, so battery life should be much worse. The Semprons and Turions both have full power saving features.

 

[Hacp]

The Celeron M will Def have similar battery life to the Pentium M if you stress your processor when your unpluged. However, If your only searching the web/etc while unplugged, the Celeron Ms should have way less battery life.

But, as people said, it depends on the laptop. If you want battery life, its better to go with ddr2 and a p-m in a centrino platform.

Performance wise, a Celeron M 1.4 GHZ with 1 MB of cache will be very close to a Pentium 4 1.4 GHZ with 2 MB of cache.

 

[Oyeve]

Originally posted by: Valkerie

Centrino is for wireless notebooks.

Um, any notebook can be wireless. That whole Centrino wireless thing was just a stupid Intel marketing ploy as the first centrino systems didnt even have wireless!

 

[Crism]

Actually, about those Semprons, I'm using the work laptop now. It's an Acer with a Sempron 2800+ 256MB RAM, 64MB of that is dedicated ot the SiS video (I cant change it goddamn it!!!), 40GB HDD, 15" XGA TFT, and the Wireless B/G. It gets an hour or an hour and a half tops. I don't know why. I turn the screen brightness down also. On the battery it says 14.8v and 2000mAh. Then the rest is in chinese I think lol.

EDIT: Just a rant....I'm working way too much this week. I'm 16, getting $7/hr, putting in OVER 40hrs at this computer store, and THE GUY DOESN'T PAY ME OVERTIME. Say I work 50 hours this week. He'll cut me a check this week for 40hrs then carry over the extra 10 to next week so he doesn't have to pay me overtime. ISN'T THIS ILLEGAL? I spoke with my friend who is a lawyer (I do some computer work for him actually) and he says I can sue, get my time and a half + more and he gets all of his lawyers fees paid by my boss.....end rant 🙂

 

[Hacp]

The Centrino platform is meant to be a more mobile platform. Thats why it has crap graphics and a crap wireless adaptor. This is because they use less power. Generally, people can't do much with 1-2 hours without the plug if they aren't using a centrino platform notebook.

 

[Fox5]

Originally posted by: Crism
Actually, about those Semprons, I'm using the work laptop now. It's an Acer with a Sempron 2800+ 256MB RAM, 64MB of that is dedicated ot the SiS video (I cant change it goddamn it!!!), 40GB HDD, 15" XGA TFT, and the Wireless B/G. It gets an hour or an hour and a half tops. I don't know why. I turn the screen brightness down also. On the battery it says 14.8v and 2000mAh. Then the rest is in chinese I think lol.

EDIT: Just a rant....I'm working way too much this week. I'm 16, getting $7/hr, putting in OVER 40hrs at this computer store, and THE GUY DOESN'T PAY ME OVERTIME. Say I work 50 hours this week. He'll cut me a check this week for 40hrs then carry over the extra 10 to next week so he doesn't have to pay me overtime. ISN'T THIS ILLEGAL? I spoke with my friend who is a lawyer (I do some computer work for him actually) and he says I can sue, get my time and a half + more and he gets all of his lawyers fees paid by my boss.....end rant 🙂

Is it one of the new semprons based on the same process as the Turions?

Anyhow, supposendly Turions in power saving mode(such as when you're typing or browsing the web) get slightly better battery life than Centrino, but slightly worse under high use situations.(I think AMD's PowerNow is able to drop clock frequency lower than Intel's Speedstep)

 

[Valkerie]

Originally posted by: PsYcHoCoW
My Acer Centrino notebook lasts for 5 hours (from a full charge) if I let it downclock (downclocked processor is still sufficient for surfing and stuff), as advertised. I use the stock 60W Li-Ion battery. My notebook gives me the option of buying a secondary battery, should I ever need it.

The difference is the Celeron M's I've seen (which are from Acer as well) came with a ~32W battery, and were advertised to last from 2 to 3 hours.

2 to 3 hours is quite a lot of time already. Performance-wise, I know that my Pentium M is very solid - at 1.8GHz and with 1GB of DDR333, I used it all the time for like a month before the parts of my new computer arrived, and I never suffered of poor performance. I think a Celeron M should be enough for smallish uses, such as web surfing, typing out documents and stuff and being able to keep in touch with stuff as you travel, but it won't be a full desktop replacement if you play games and do lots of intensive work on it.

I think you can expect performance similar from the Celeron M to that of a powerful P3.

Some Celerons come with 1/2mb of cache, which is a lot of a processor. They will outperform a Pentium M with 512/640kb cache (vice versa)

 

[formulav8]

I would not get a Celeron anything. Just that name puts a bad taste in my mouth.

Anyways, as others has pointed out, the performance is not as good as the PM and neither is the battery life. The Celeron is a crippled PM. Half the L2 Cache, and NO Speedstep Tech. So, it runs at the full mhz no Mattter what you are doing. There are other things as well that I don't remember. So, it will be worse than the PM in everything from performance to battery life.


Jason

 

[shoRunner]

i have a gateway laptop with a celeron m and i get about 2.5-3 hours battery life. the 1mb less cache from the pentium m does very little for performance.

Originally posted by: Fox5
Is it one of the new semprons based on the same process as the Turions?

there isn't a sempron based on the turion, all they have are the regular 90nm skt 754 semprons thrown into a laptop.

 

[glorygunk]

Generally performance wise, Celerons and Pentiums perform the same. Battery life is much better for the Pentium. I've heard up to double. My Celeron laptop lasts 2-3 hrs for regular work, much less for DVD watching.

 

[Arcanedeath]

the Celron M does not support speed steep and has 1/2 the cache of the comparable PM core, otherwise its exactly the same as the PM of the same clockspeed, so if both PC's are under 100% load w/ just different processors they would have the same battery life, but if your not pegging the cpu while on the battery the PM can downclock and get 1-2hrs longer battery life w/ low usage on a normal (90wh/hr typical) battery.

 

[Fox5]

How often do you use a cpu at 100% utilization? Unless you're playing a game, you're probably not.