Benchmarks: Vitals and Battery Life
With this amount of high-performance hardware, Aero 15 is having to work hard when under the cosh. CPU temperature is inevitably reduced through throttling, helping prevent the chassis from becoming too hot to handle, but noise levels are a constant presence irrespective of Nvidia's latest WhisperSync optimisations.
We use a pair of PCMark 10 benchmarks to gauge battery life; Modern Office, which intermittently uses the writing, web browsing and video conferencing workloads from the main PCMark 10 benchmark; and Gaming, which uses the common Fire Strike test to stress the GPU until the battery is drained.
In order to make the results comparable between laptops, each system is configured with a purpose-built power plan, wireless radios disabled, and screen brightness set as close to 200 nits as possible using a calibration device.
It is interesting to note that, despite a slightly larger battery, Gigabyte has not been able to improve battery life with its latest Aero 15 OLED. Indeed, total run time during the office test is reduced to a smidgen over five-and-a-half hours. Decent for such a high-performance machine? Perhaps, but not enough to get through a full working day.