Apart from its blazing performance, of the features of Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 800M series of GPUs is Battery Boost, which will automatically throttle different components on your notebook to preserve battery power, while still delivering reasonable frame rates. According to the company, mobile gamers can expect to get up to twice as much juice out of their notebooks. But how well does it work? We put Nvidia's claims to the test and were impressed when our benchmark laptop lasted 42-percent longer with Battery Boost enabled.
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Our test rig was the ASUS G750JZ-XS72, which has an Nvidia GeForce GTX 880M GPU, which our tests showed to be the most powerful in Nvidia's mobile lineup. After navigating to the Battery Tab in the Nvidia GeForce Experience utility, we were able to turn on this feature, and adjust the slider to the desired maximum frame rate.
Nvidia says that Battery Boost is most effective with games that you can run at around 70-80 fps while your notebook is plugged in. In other words, if you have the settings so high that a game only runs at around 30 fps, you're not going to see any improvement in battery life.
For the purposes of our test, we set the max frame rate at 30 fps, and the ASUS' screen to 50 percent brightness. We then played "World of Tanks" with the resolution at 1920 x 1080, effects set to low, and the volume on medium.
With Battery Boost turned off, we were able to play for 1 hour and 32 minutes. With Battery Boost on, the ASUS lasted 2:11, an improvement of 39 minutes or 42 percent . That's not too shabby, considering the average desktop replacement lasts 4:06--and that's on the Laptop Mag Battery Test, (Web surfing via Wi-Fi), which is much less demanding, and uses a notebook's integrated GPU instead of a discrete graphics card. On this test, the ASUS lasted 6:26.
But we digress. Although it's just one test, we were impressed with the increased gaming time we saw on the ASUS. So long as you keep your expectations within reason, you should see a general improvement in battery life while blasting away baddies on your notebook.
