Just want to say I'm a recent subscriber and your coverage of these laptops have been top notch. All other reviews I watched left me feeling unsatisfied they did not feel empirical like yours do. In addition your perspective of a developer helps a lot as I too am a developer
A couple of ways you can make the charts easier to consume: 1. For bar/charts like efficiency chart, it easier to parse if the bars are arranged in ascending or descending. That quickly lets people know the best, worst as well as where their particular interest ranks. 2. For other charts, the legend should be sorted according to value. So for units of work done, the sort the legend for units of work done. Same reason as above. Great video!
Agree, those charts are hard to read especially the battery drain vs work done with the dots being almost similar colored and hopping all around, its very hard to map which laptop is which.
It would also be great if the charts used colours. Something like Apple laptops having shades of red, Intel ones having blue shades, and Snapdragons with some other colour
I always view it from 2 types of tests. A) How long can I binge watch Netflix on a flight ✈️. This shows the true max battery life. B) Battery life doing my routine use of my laptop. Not the max battery life, but abused battery life.
@@deliciouspops I'm talking in relative here. At the very least Alex have tested the battery life of these laptops so much better than your average reviewers. So, what I meant by scientific is that his methodology and analysis are "more" scientific.
Getting capitalisation of units right *is* important though. Consider a disk with 500mb/s throughout compared to one with 500MB/s… That’s 500 milli-bits per second (1 milli-bit = 1/8000 of a byte per second) or 500 mega-bytes per second…. The second one would take 2 seconds to transfer a 1GB file….the first one would take 507 *years* 😂
That settles it, I'm going for the X Plus. I've seen other videos where the X Plus not only is basically on par with the X Elite, but sometimes even outperforms it. And since it's been proven to be the more efficient chip, that's my top pick given that I am a fairly light user. Thanks for the great work, Alex!
I miss the slimmer and lighter form factor and OLED display on my previous Robo & Kala, but otherwise I am very happy I went with the base model Surface Pro with Snapdragon X Plus.
I am really enjoying my Surface Laptop 7 15". The all day battery is killer along instant off when closing the lid and almost zero battery drain while asleep. My workload is a bit different, but I do many code reviews and builds per day and spend a lot of time on Teams and Zoom calls and like you have Spotify playing music. I have seen a 20% left on the batter after 14 hours of use. Other reviewers out there either have a chip on their shoulder and they are out to discredit the new Windows on Arm devices, or they never read that gaming isn't the intended use case. Microsoft and Qualcomm has a winner with the Snapdragon X Plus and Elite chips.
I gave up on surface series n other windows based laptops after years of suffering poor battery life on the go. A laptop that can drain its battery to zero within a few weeks after fully shut down. A joke. Macbook pro has recently become my first apple laptop n its battery life is unbelievably legendary long indeed
@@joshuaprecious it’s very normal for that to happen; it’s just so that charge capacity should not be less than design capacity just so not to get any quality control issues or complaints, if it is less than that raises an obvious red flag.
Next gen should have effecency core like cortex 730 or x4 also better GPU with RTX hope they fix all software related issues before launching new series like intel and keep improving like intel 😊
@@brandonw1604 the issues people are getting are due to the software not yet being native to windows on arm not due to the laptops themselves, over time these issues will be solved when software becomes native. Apples M1 also had issues like this when it first launched so dont act like apple is perfect, nobody is. When the second generation of this chip is released we will also have greater advancements, competition is good. Respect to Apple, but just cause your a fanboy doesnt mean you should hate
@@BigOrangeManapple fanboys. Windows fanboys. ARM fanboys. Linus fanboys. Why is there still a compulsive need to label users? Are you still feeling insecure or something?
Love it Alex. You clearly lean towards Macs yet you are not a fan boy. You give a proper real world tests of everything and have a good understanding of all systems. This type of coverage is refreshing.
Finally a developer tech tuber with real dev task based battery test of these snapdragon chips ❤ Looks promising but would probably skip this generation as by next year they would get all their drivers and emulation sorted out to be more stable.
@@AZisk you know I’m enjoying your creativity, but last videos quality subjectively feels like an explosion for me. It’s 700k+ sub content! Please keep it up and enjoy the process 😊
thanks, both system doing really well for the purpose so thanks to everyones hard work its alot easier to distinguish sounds now, and more importantly to spot their strengths
I bought a new surface pro and I was shocked with how long the battery lasted. I went to bed after a full day of use and my pro still had about 30% battery left. I did notice that playing 3D games like Halo 3 and Reach destroyed the battery life, which was expected, but games like Master Duel and 2D platformers was just fine even after hours of play. I also watched a couple of movies, drew in photoshop and browsed the web during the day and the battery was just fine. I’m pretty happy with my purchase.
This is an awesome video that noone else is making, thank you! However, I feel like for the sake of clarity you could remove some of laptops from the graphs to make them more readable and perhaps include the full graphs in the description for the people who want to know more.
Add someone who watches Gamers Nexus videos, this wasn't that many. Having different colors would be nice though. Maybe apple sillicon in one, Snapdragon in another, and Intel in a third
The X plus is the most energy efficient all, because it is not designed to go all way up in the frequency where you need far more energy for a little extra performance. For most people it’s the best option.
Frankly speaking, we do not work 24/7. At some point we will connect the laptop with the power cable and charge it. Any laptop that can run more than 15 hours a day without charging is good enough. Nowadays, products are priced above the necessary usages (oversell features to users).
Well said, most these testers fail to account for the fact that a more powerful computer will do more benchmark "loops" (aka work) before it dies and then just announce the last standing as the winner, even though it's got a 15w chip that did 1/3 the work. Thankfully we have Mr Ziskind
Wow, what an excellent and practical benchmark! I really appreciate how you've focused on simulating real-world daily usage for office and programming work. It's refreshing to see tests that actually reflect how most of us use our laptops, instead of unrealistic scenarios or artificial workflows. I found this much more insightful and relevant than some other channels' benchmarks (like Max Tech's). Your approach gives a much clearer picture of how these laptops would perform in day-to-day professional use. Great job on putting together such a comprehensive and realistic comparison. This video is definitely a valuable resource for anyone considering an ARM-based laptop for work or programming. Keep up the fantastic content!
And I wondered why you have not been uploading lately.... That's AWESOME Thanks for the video For the effort you made into developing code just to attain accurate results that suits YOU and your viewers. 👏 Mad respect
Great testing! I wonder how many people use their laptop in performance mode when on battery. I use mine always on balanced. This gives most of the performance while being a lot cooler and letting the CPU use more efficient operating points.
Alex - yet again, you have nailed it. It isn't just about battery life, it is about efficiency - and I haven't seen any other reviewers do this. Brilliant test, brilliant video and I'm thoroughly enjoying this series on the new QCOM chips. Also, kudos on the script - impressive.
This is some off the best review content I've ever seen. Correct workload, scientific, and presents the right data, but enough data to actually make real purchasing decisions. Please don't stop, you and LTT Labs are my only trusted source for laptop reviews right now. You've gained a subscriber.
you're literally my favourite channel to watch when it comes to laptop reviews. Finally somebody tests what we devs do and not those standard video editing and rendering rubbish we never do xD.
Shine Man. Thats what most of us wanted to see. Majority of the buyers are not interested in gaming, or benchmark score. We want the machine to do everything, with productivity (coding, office works etc.) at highest priority. You are the only reviewer whose video we wait for.
You know he's a software developer when he spends half the video explaining the testing methodology, and then the actual graphs all have the python matplotlib default styling
it'd be interesting to see the same test done on the Yoga and Acer Snapdragon laptops. The Yoga has a 70 Wh battery but in other tests is consistently better than the other laptops with a similar battery. The Acer on the other hand has a 75 Wh battery and an IPS display which would save quite a bit of power, it's also available with the X Plus
I wonder, if one of the laptops finished, let's say the compilation of the code first, did it idle until the timer ran out to complete the cycle within the 30min exactly? If that is the case, it'd be more interesting to see how long they survive and how many not hard coded cycles they can get through. It should be fairly simple to await the compilation, check status of the python execution, etc. with more performance related tasks. Regardless, your tests and coverage of these machines is excellent and the only source I trust on UA-cam to not be sponsored by either side and give proper reviews. Really thank you for the detailed coverage.
It's good that this is an automated test, as it will have to be ran again when Zen 5 is out, then when M4 is out, and again when Lunar Lake is out ... maybe even when Arrow Lake is out, though Arrow Lake is known to not focus on efficiency. But I'm a bit at a loss that each iteration lasts 30 minutes. Does that mean that the performance is about the same between all the models ? I highly doubt that. It is true though that most people will leave this as is and even if they could squeeze 50% more battery life at indistinguishable cost of performance (and that also, in rare cases), most people would simply go to high performance when working. But, I think it would also be a very good idea to have a test where the time it takes is fully up to the performance of the chips, no waiting around. And then have 3 runs for each chip - one with the max performance, one with max power efficiency and one with a reasonably fast/decent performance of the task(s) tested, have them all perform just as fast, and see how much work it can do until it dies. And this "reasonably fast" would mean trying to tune the chip to work at that level, not be faster, aka, have the max efficiency while meeting the "decently fast" criteria. I'm not sure though how tunable the laptops + OSes are for this. Thing is, the Intel chips, they can happily chew more than 100W, so if your battery has enough power, they can literally last only 30 minutes. Buuut, they can be tuned to be much more efficient, at the expense of some performance (which might not be that much, depends on many factors). Too bad that the laptop manufacturers usually tune the laptops for more performance even when it doesn't make sense. Because battery life is less known/tested/understood so it's simply easier to have good scores in benchmarks, even if your laptop is very very hot, very loud and drains the battery in minutes. Here Apple design shows how much better it is, as they actually tune for the customer (usually), not for a benchmark. Basically, I'm curious if the Intel chips can be made to be ... like twice as efficient, how would that go. They still wouldn't win the efficiency war, but they wouldn't look as bad. And I'm curious if the performance would be enough. I suspect it would.
Really good stuff! Minor nitpick - the data collection is A+ but I think the presentation is only a B. The graphs are a bit challenging to read. The one showing the work done, if you could find a way to highlight and draw attention to whatever you’re currently talking about that would be amazing. And the efficient charts are near perfect, but it would be nice to see them sorted from best to worst performers so that it’s easy for us to see drop offs and ones that very closer together. Overall amazing stuff!
Nice tests. I'd be curious how much the screen takes up battery. Not only do larger and brighter screens consume more but the type of screen can affect the test too. OLED panels can draw quite a bit more power especially in apps that tend to use a full white background instead of darker colors. This can significantly reduce power draw of the screen too. Screen resolution is another factor as well as a 1080p screen consumes less power than a 4K screen. Another factor is refresh rate as a 60hz panel will consume less power than one at a higher refresh rate. Plus, some laptops can also vary the refresh rate to reduce power consumption like how Apple does it for their Pro motion displays. I'd love to see you narrow down how much each of these factors could possibly effect battery
Hey Alex, good work! very comprehensive and technical. could you please tell me which software you used to prepare these charts? and how did you collect the data.
This has to be the only Battery Life Test I've seen in a long time that has left me satisfied. Thank God I stumbled upon your channel. At least I can see the parameters on which you're basing your claims. And the parameters are actually representative of real-world usage. Not dumb shit like watching Netflix for 20 hours like seriosuly. Whenever people spew that shit out, the first thing I'm reminded of is high school math, where some Jackass is buying 87 Watermelons and what not lmao. Keep up the good work.
Is there Python for ARM? You compiled ARM version for Windows? Mac have it precompiled with system. Also library you are using are this is ARM library? What your test did exactly step by step? What apps were ran? What brightness was set on those laptops? I see some of them are brighter than others on your video. And also I noticed that you started test when battery was 97% on one of the laptops and it was visible in console. Also putting those laptops on desk with wifi caused that some of them had harder network conditions because of radio waves overlapping, laptops in the middle had hardest conditions. What was screen refresh rates on those laptops?
Finally, the first video actually showcasing a battery comparison between X Elite, M-series, and Intel. Thank you. I daily drive an M1 Air and this kinda gave me more confidence that switching to Mac from Windows was a good call. I get a solid 12-18 hours of battery.
probably the best benchmark video out their. honestly the effort , time, energy, money, skill+expertise, is beyond 99.999% of people. You deserve a sub for that. well done
i'd suggest checking out how geekerwan does his efficiency tests. Sometimes the battery figures from manufacturers arent perfectly accurate. And these chips will also have different efficiencies at different utilization. A proper power curve really paints the full picture for these chips.
What powercfg setting was used during the test? High performance? Ultimate? Battery saver, etc? Great video! Hoping we get another round of X Elite based machines; and also curious how they perform running arm64 Linux or arm64 freebsd
great battery tests i could say it definately represents real world usage keep making such videos !!! btw were the refresh rate of windows machines were set to 120 or 60 during the tests?
Finally someone with a testing methodology that goes beyond playing a youtube video for whatever hours. I wonder how those X elites will stack up if on linux, where presumably you can accomplish a much greater degree of ARM optimizations (as all of the source is easily available to qualcomm engineers). On top of that due to android efforts I would assume that the entire platform should be more mature and welcoming to ARM / alternatives ISAs
Have to shout out your effort to come up with an innovating way of testing all those machines.. I totally agree that most of reviewers are testing in pretty generic ways, which can't be further for real life scenarios, so thanks for that, well done! :)
Wow! This is very thorough work, time and effort! No reviewer goes through this level of effort! Thank you for that! I was surprised with the results! The M3 Macbook Air is impressive!
Great analysis, really impressive. Huge appreciation for the amount of work to make such a high quality informative video like this. As for the Dell XPS, I noticed that the Intel Ultra version lasted about 1h30, whereas the Snapdragon lasted for about 5h. It's a huge difference (we know that Snapdragon should last more, but not to a margin of 230% increase). My assumption is that the Dell XPS Intel chip was higher resolution QHD+ or 3K OLED, whereas the Snapdragon version was a lower resolution (FHD+), just a guess, as this apparently was not described in the video.
Thank you for doing this. I've been waiting for a detailed set of battery life tests for a while now. Every other review just gives a nebulous number of hours, exactly as you stated. Now I need to research the battery size and SOC of the Surface Pro 11 so I can correlate it to the data you have here. Might do the same for the Asus Proart Z13 as well. EDIT: SP11, SD X Plus, 46WHr battery. SL7, SD X Plus, 54WHrs. Basic math, SP11 is 85% of the capacity. Duration is likely 85% of 330 mins. So 281 mins, or 4 hours and 40 mins vs. 330 mins or 5 hours 30 mins. Not bad.
Finally a test of machines that represents real world use. Excellent job! Happy to see how well my old? M1 16" Pro held up. Thanks again for a great job!
"Superb explanation. Using charts and showing how the battery test was actually done was excellent work. The way you explained each and every point reminds me of my college professor. I will call you Professor Alex
Thank you for the detailed test, I've a better idea about the battery now, especially wrt performance. Now it's a choice of ecosystem, speaker and touch pad (which Macs are great for), price, and software compatibility (AutoCAD and Civil 3D don't work with Snapdragon until now). For me, if Autodesk gets out a version that works in Snapdragon, I'll go with those. But if money was not an issue, I'd go with the Macs (at least for now)
I really like the approach to how you tested these machines but I have to ask, how did you control for screen brightness? I doubt they all have the same max brightness, but auto brightness would be a fair enough approach.
Damn, who could have possibly gone through this much research to show us the actual performance of the batteries. Alex should be the ultimate tester of these machines, nowadays.
Pretty cool test, thanks for this, that makes me feel quite good with the XPS 13 that is currently on the way over to me :) I think the XPS might even have another trick up its sleeve that wasn't really able to shine here: it has a VRR screen that goes down to 30 fps. So if you're not always doing something but just lulling about, reading or thinking about why ones code doesn't run, it will conserve even more battery
Thanks Alex. Though 2 points want to mention that should go into consideration in your test. 1. At 11:20 you mentioned that each loop was 30 mins hence the efficiency plots look similar but ideally the loops should be one piece of work done, so time to execute code, etc should be factored in and they can be almost 30 mins but more efficient machine would have been able to complete loop in slightly lesser time, this would make better efficiency comparison towards the end. 2. Wanted to hear that all Windows machines were set to max performance mode; as when all youtubers compare their performance with Apple M series they set them to max performance, but when comparing battery they let it compare on balanced mode. This is not fair, their battery should be tested at same performance level that is being compared with Macbooks. Hope the input is useful in future videos. And agian thanks for testing these in fair and real world settings so thoroughly!
thanks for the input. the loop was 30 min precisely because some machines will be faster than others, but since we’re simulating humans, that shouldn’t matter. I did mention that i set high performance on all the machines for this test.
Dude, based on your last video comparing the power plans I thought that that battery benchmark will be on the balanced plan, and I was ready to get disappointed. but wow after you said that it was on the high-performance plan, that's a game changer.
fyi, you need to consider the battery age, as half-life for li battery starts when it ships. So better way is connect a power emulator instead of battery. Might be a bit destructive... but that'll get you the power consumption data.
Always a delight to check out your videos. It's on one side well explained, technical but also fun to watch, funny overall. Thank you for doing it man, we love you.
Man all these must have cost an ARM or 2.
I believe it was 4
nice pun
Ha , Elite joke 😉
Ohhh nice one
😂😂😂😂😂
Just want to say I'm a recent subscriber and your coverage of these laptops have been top notch. All other reviews I watched left me feeling unsatisfied they did not feel empirical like yours do. In addition your perspective of a developer helps a lot as I too am a developer
Agreed on Alex's very good coverage of these new devices.
Same
true, really good videos
A couple of ways you can make the charts easier to consume:
1. For bar/charts like efficiency chart, it easier to parse if the bars are arranged in ascending or descending. That quickly lets people know the best, worst as well as where their particular interest ranks.
2. For other charts, the legend should be sorted according to value. So for units of work done, the sort the legend for units of work done. Same reason as above.
Great video!
Agree, those charts are hard to read especially the battery drain vs work done with the dots being almost similar colored and hopping all around, its very hard to map which laptop is which.
+1
It would also be great if the charts used colours. Something like Apple laptops having shades of red, Intel ones having blue shades, and Snapdragons with some other colour
@@omlanke3466 apple could be white/silver, Intel blue and Snapdragon yellow
This is the best battery test I've ever seen on the internet. No more wishy-washy unrealistic tests by reviewers, but one that is scientific.
I always view it from 2 types of tests.
A) How long can I binge watch Netflix on a flight ✈️. This shows the true max battery life.
B) Battery life doing my routine use of my laptop. Not the max battery life, but abused battery life.
scientific? would we consider how much displays drain the battery. different sizes, different technologies, etc.
@@deliciouspops I'm talking in relative here. At the very least Alex have tested the battery life of these laptops so much better than your average reviewers. So, what I meant by scientific is that his methodology and analysis are "more" scientific.
Alex is kicking ass. He is no joke. If you can, become a member.
@@HarisAzriel agreed.
This is how every review should be done. Thanks
Also note that the Surface Laptop 7 with X Plus is running at 120hz vs 60hz on the MacBook Air M3. Impressive!
Hz not hz
Getting capitalisation of units right *is* important though. Consider a disk with 500mb/s throughout compared to one with 500MB/s…
That’s 500 milli-bits per second (1 milli-bit = 1/8000 of a byte per second) or 500 mega-bytes per second….
The second one would take 2 seconds to transfer a 1GB file….the first one would take 507 *years* 😂
@@flexairz oh thank you for the correction. I thought he meant hoonga zoonga for a minute
M3 pro has also 120
@@flexairzNo differences, unlike MB/s and Mb/s
That settles it, I'm going for the X Plus. I've seen other videos where the X Plus not only is basically on par with the X Elite, but sometimes even outperforms it. And since it's been proven to be the more efficient chip, that's my top pick given that I am a fairly light user.
Thanks for the great work, Alex!
I think so as well.
I think the biggest issue will be, to find laptops who will use it.
I personally will not go without an OLED as an example.
I miss the slimmer and lighter form factor and OLED display on my previous Robo & Kala, but otherwise I am very happy I went with the base model Surface Pro with Snapdragon X Plus.
@@shalokshalom Also only 16 GB versions... no 32.
@@shalokshalom Lenovo has a new Yoga slim 7X that uses the X-Plus chip with an OLED display. The build quality is top notch, full metal body.
I am really enjoying my Surface Laptop 7 15". The all day battery is killer along instant off when closing the lid and almost zero battery drain while asleep. My workload is a bit different, but I do many code reviews and builds per day and spend a lot of time on Teams and Zoom calls and like you have Spotify playing music. I have seen a 20% left on the batter after 14 hours of use. Other reviewers out there either have a chip on their shoulder and they are out to discredit the new Windows on Arm devices, or they never read that gaming isn't the intended use case. Microsoft and Qualcomm has a winner with the Snapdragon X Plus and Elite chips.
Does it have the X elite or Plus?
@@mechwar X1E-80-100 (elite) 12 Core 4 GHz boost
get a macbook, can done your work very well, atleast more better than surface laptop and it is macbook so battery is never an issue
@@VerseVibes09 I believe he already bought a laptop, and just buying a new laptop might be kind of wasteful dude?
I gave up on surface series n other windows based laptops after years of suffering poor battery life on the go. A laptop that can drain its battery to zero within a few weeks after fully shut down. A joke. Macbook pro has recently become my first apple laptop n its battery life is unbelievably legendary long indeed
This is an AMAZING benchmark - congrats
It's an ARMazing benchmark.
@@jaycee9385 These new chips are far from ARMless
So refreshing to see that someone talks about laptops outside of benchmarks and loop video tests (always baseless tests).
6:21, 70 KWH Capacity😐, also the amount of effort it takes to create these types of videos is just mind blowing
ykwim
Could power my house a whole day with that 70KWh laptop battery 😂
I think its 70kmah battery? 70KWA would drive a Tesla
@@fidelisitor8953 Or spending a whole year using the laptop without ever charging it
@@andrewkuhne2586 70kmAh would be equivalent to 70Ah. Still way too much. He means 70Wh there.
4:42 The Full charge capacity is actually more that the design capacity on the report
Yeah, he didn't realize that.
yes
@@joshuaprecious it’s very normal for that to happen; it’s just so that charge capacity should not be less than design capacity just so not to get any quality control issues or complaints, if it is less than that raises an obvious red flag.
maybe it's normal but the good Ser is not used to seeing this, which is how he ended up reading out the opposite of what he was seeing
Yes, I wanted to comment on that, but you have already done so.
Nice catch 👍.
Alex, you're tempting me WAAAYYYY to much to convert from Mac
The Windows ARM laptops suck, people trying to actually do work on them are getting real issues.
I think the next gen arm CPUs for windows are gonna be great
Next gen should have effecency core like cortex 730 or x4 also better GPU with RTX hope they fix all software related issues before launching new series like intel and keep improving like intel 😊
Wait one more generation.
The first generation of everything is always shitty.
@@brandonw1604 the issues people are getting are due to the software not yet being native to windows on arm not due to the laptops themselves, over time these issues will be solved when software becomes native. Apples M1 also had issues like this when it first launched so dont act like apple is perfect, nobody is. When the second generation of this chip is released we will also have greater advancements, competition is good. Respect to Apple, but just cause your a fanboy doesnt mean you should hate
Alex, your reviews have set a new standard. I'm officially only listening to your opinions over LTT and MKBHD
MKBHD is dropping the ball big time with snapdragons x, very few videos lately.
@@Executor009 not enough time, he has many other fields to review like cars recently
@@Executor009 im sure those apple fanboys doesn't have a windows device in 10 mile radius
@@BigOrangeManapple fanboys. Windows fanboys. ARM fanboys. Linus fanboys.
Why is there still a compulsive need to label users? Are you still feeling insecure or something?
This is gonna be sick, thank you for doing this for us! You're the best
"The Schwarzenegger Battery Endurance Test" - by Alex Ziskind (Toughest of Them All)
Alex runs on coffee, not battery, so apples to oranges 😎
This is what we needed.
Most practical benchmark for our use-case. Tested like a true developer!
Love it Alex. You clearly lean towards Macs yet you are not a fan boy. You give a proper real world tests of everything and have a good understanding of all systems. This type of coverage is refreshing.
Dude, your channel is like literally one of the few best on UA-cam! I recently bought a Yoga Slim 7x with X Elite after watching ALL of your videos
Awesome video! X Elite is killing it!
Hi Max
thank you!
@@MaxTechOfficial no its not
@@cosmicreaverkassadin1143 is pretty close if you consider cost and performance...
Yeah, it's killing the market with slop.
Arm is a plague, if only you knew how bad things really were.
The Snapdragon X plus is the one to get! Great power usage to performance ratio and good pricing!
Finally a developer tech tuber with real dev task based battery test of these snapdragon chips ❤
Looks promising but would probably skip this generation as by next year they would get all their drivers and emulation sorted out to be more stable.
Oh man, your content is more and more professional in any way! So amazing!
Glad you think so!
@@AZisk you know I’m enjoying your creativity, but last videos quality subjectively feels like an explosion for me. It’s 700k+ sub content! Please keep it up and enjoy the process 😊
thanks, both system doing really well for the purpose so thanks to everyones hard work
its alot easier to distinguish sounds now, and more importantly to spot their strengths
I bought a new surface pro and I was shocked with how long the battery lasted. I went to bed after a full day of use and my pro still had about 30% battery left.
I did notice that playing 3D games like Halo 3 and Reach destroyed the battery life, which was expected, but games like Master Duel and 2D platformers was just fine even after hours of play. I also watched a couple of movies, drew in photoshop and browsed the web during the day and the battery was just fine. I’m pretty happy with my purchase.
This is an awesome video that noone else is making, thank you! However, I feel like for the sake of clarity you could remove some of laptops from the graphs to make them more readable and perhaps include the full graphs in the description for the people who want to know more.
Add someone who watches Gamers Nexus videos, this wasn't that many. Having different colors would be nice though. Maybe apple sillicon in one, Snapdragon in another, and Intel in a third
Wow Surface with X Plus wins. Did not expect that!
The X plus is the most energy efficient all, because it is not designed to go all way up in the frequency where you need far more energy for a little extra performance. For most people it’s the best option.
@@ricarmigWild because the X Plus is actually faster than the M3 in multicore performance
😨
@@SixPathsOfJin that for sure , but let’s not talk about graphics performance there the M3 is several times faster than the snapdragon
@@ricarmig They made a good choice not trying to outperform in graphics because people aren’t buying those laptops to game.
Battery is more important.
Frankly speaking, we do not work 24/7. At some point we will connect the laptop with the power cable and charge it. Any laptop that can run more than 15 hours a day without charging is good enough. Nowadays, products are priced above the necessary usages (oversell features to users).
My man doing the real reviews out here on youtube thank you so much alex please keep doing the awesome work!!
your reviews are the only ones that make sense
The effort for these videos is wild🔥. Need more appreciation and recognition
Well said, most these testers fail to account for the fact that a more powerful computer will do more benchmark "loops" (aka work) before it dies and then just announce the last standing as the winner, even though it's got a 15w chip that did 1/3 the work. Thankfully we have Mr Ziskind
Wow, what an excellent and practical benchmark! I really appreciate how you've focused on simulating real-world daily usage for office and programming work. It's refreshing to see tests that actually reflect how most of us use our laptops, instead of unrealistic scenarios or artificial workflows.
I found this much more insightful and relevant than some other channels' benchmarks (like Max Tech's). Your approach gives a much clearer picture of how these laptops would perform in day-to-day professional use.
Great job on putting together such a comprehensive and realistic comparison. This video is definitely a valuable resource for anyone considering an ARM-based laptop for work or programming. Keep up the fantastic content!
This has been my experience with my Surface Laptop 7 Plus. The battery life has been amazing!
And I wondered why you have not been uploading lately....
That's AWESOME
Thanks for the video
For the effort you made into developing code just to attain accurate results that suits YOU and your viewers.
👏 Mad respect
this one took some time
Great testing!
I wonder how many people use their laptop in performance mode when on battery.
I use mine always on balanced. This gives most of the performance while being a lot cooler and letting the CPU use more efficient operating points.
This is what I actually waiting for 😅.
I was actually considering the x plus version of Surface laptops, and to see it fared best is quite good
Alex - yet again, you have nailed it. It isn't just about battery life, it is about efficiency - and I haven't seen any other reviewers do this. Brilliant test, brilliant video and I'm thoroughly enjoying this series on the new QCOM chips. Also, kudos on the script - impressive.
I love data, this is literally the best battery test video on here.
This is some off the best review content I've ever seen. Correct workload, scientific, and presents the right data, but enough data to actually make real purchasing decisions. Please don't stop, you and LTT Labs are my only trusted source for laptop reviews right now. You've gained a subscriber.
Nothing to say. Just so impressed with the work you did here, I am adding a comment to appease the UA-cam algorithm gods
you're literally my favourite channel to watch when it comes to laptop reviews. Finally somebody tests what we devs do and not those standard video editing and rendering rubbish we never do xD.
Shine Man.
Thats what most of us wanted to see.
Majority of the buyers are not interested in gaming, or benchmark score.
We want the machine to do everything, with productivity (coding, office works etc.) at highest priority.
You are the only reviewer whose video we wait for.
How did you run the test back in January when you just wrote the code now over the past 3 days as you mentioned?
You know he's a software developer when he spends half the video explaining the testing methodology, and then the actual graphs all have the python matplotlib default styling
it'd be interesting to see the same test done on the Yoga and Acer Snapdragon laptops. The Yoga has a 70 Wh battery but in other tests is consistently better than the other laptops with a similar battery. The Acer on the other hand has a 75 Wh battery and an IPS display which would save quite a bit of power, it's also available with the X Plus
finally, real tests, just amazing work. congrats. as a developer myself, love seeing this..
the only thing I can "criticize" is the lack of AMD CPUs, but man, this is how you do it. Awesome video, awesome test, keep up the good work!
I wonder, if one of the laptops finished, let's say the compilation of the code first, did it idle until the timer ran out to complete the cycle within the 30min exactly? If that is the case, it'd be more interesting to see how long they survive and how many not hard coded cycles they can get through. It should be fairly simple to await the compilation, check status of the python execution, etc. with more performance related tasks.
Regardless, your tests and coverage of these machines is excellent and the only source I trust on UA-cam to not be sponsored by either side and give proper reviews. Really thank you for the detailed coverage.
It's good that this is an automated test, as it will have to be ran again when Zen 5 is out, then when M4 is out, and again when Lunar Lake is out ... maybe even when Arrow Lake is out, though Arrow Lake is known to not focus on efficiency.
But I'm a bit at a loss that each iteration lasts 30 minutes. Does that mean that the performance is about the same between all the models ? I highly doubt that.
It is true though that most people will leave this as is and even if they could squeeze 50% more battery life at indistinguishable cost of performance (and that also, in rare cases), most people would simply go to high performance when working.
But, I think it would also be a very good idea to have a test where the time it takes is fully up to the performance of the chips, no waiting around. And then have 3 runs for each chip - one with the max performance, one with max power efficiency and one with a reasonably fast/decent performance of the task(s) tested, have them all perform just as fast, and see how much work it can do until it dies. And this "reasonably fast" would mean trying to tune the chip to work at that level, not be faster, aka, have the max efficiency while meeting the "decently fast" criteria. I'm not sure though how tunable the laptops + OSes are for this.
Thing is, the Intel chips, they can happily chew more than 100W, so if your battery has enough power, they can literally last only 30 minutes. Buuut, they can be tuned to be much more efficient, at the expense of some performance (which might not be that much, depends on many factors). Too bad that the laptop manufacturers usually tune the laptops for more performance even when it doesn't make sense. Because battery life is less known/tested/understood so it's simply easier to have good scores in benchmarks, even if your laptop is very very hot, very loud and drains the battery in minutes. Here Apple design shows how much better it is, as they actually tune for the customer (usually), not for a benchmark.
Basically, I'm curious if the Intel chips can be made to be ... like twice as efficient, how would that go. They still wouldn't win the efficiency war, but they wouldn't look as bad. And I'm curious if the performance would be enough. I suspect it would.
I've never seen that kind of effort or even any close to a laptop battery comparison. Keep the hard work.
Really good stuff!
Minor nitpick - the data collection is A+ but I think the presentation is only a B.
The graphs are a bit challenging to read. The one showing the work done, if you could find a way to highlight and draw attention to whatever you’re currently talking about that would be amazing.
And the efficient charts are near perfect, but it would be nice to see them sorted from best to worst performers so that it’s easy for us to see drop offs and ones that very closer together.
Overall amazing stuff!
Nice tests. I'd be curious how much the screen takes up battery. Not only do larger and brighter screens consume more but the type of screen can affect the test too. OLED panels can draw quite a bit more power especially in apps that tend to use a full white background instead of darker colors. This can significantly reduce power draw of the screen too. Screen resolution is another factor as well as a 1080p screen consumes less power than a 4K screen. Another factor is refresh rate as a 60hz panel will consume less power than one at a higher refresh rate. Plus, some laptops can also vary the refresh rate to reduce power consumption like how Apple does it for their Pro motion displays. I'd love to see you narrow down how much each of these factors could possibly effect battery
Nice and thorough. But did you set the displays to have the same brightness in nits?
Hey Alex, good work! very comprehensive and technical. could you please tell me which software you used to prepare these charts? and how did you collect the data.
This has to be the only Battery Life Test I've seen in a long time that has left me satisfied.
Thank God I stumbled upon your channel.
At least I can see the parameters on which you're basing your claims.
And the parameters are actually representative of real-world usage.
Not dumb shit like watching Netflix for 20 hours like seriosuly.
Whenever people spew that shit out, the first thing I'm reminded of is high school math, where some Jackass is buying 87 Watermelons and what not lmao.
Keep up the good work.
Is there Python for ARM? You compiled ARM version for Windows? Mac have it precompiled with system. Also library you are using are this is ARM library? What your test did exactly step by step? What apps were ran? What brightness was set on those laptops? I see some of them are brighter than others on your video. And also I noticed that you started test when battery was 97% on one of the laptops and it was visible in console. Also putting those laptops on desk with wifi caused that some of them had harder network conditions because of radio waves overlapping, laptops in the middle had hardest conditions. What was screen refresh rates on those laptops?
You’re a hero… as someone trying to decide between these machines, this is EXACTLY what I’ve been waiting to see
9:42, Yep Alex is built different. I’m always excited to come see your amazing content.
guess theyre for fun only, might as well buy an airpods
i mean as well
Holy god my brother! I’m so impressed at how much work you’ve done just for this video
People don't realize how much work it takes to do something like this.
Hats off to you man
like any tech youtuber here really, you need to reach certain experience to finally can do reviews
but thanks
I didn't see any mention about screen brightness settings in the video. Were they all running with the same nits output?
Finally, the first video actually showcasing a battery comparison between X Elite, M-series, and Intel. Thank you.
I daily drive an M1 Air and this kinda gave me more confidence that switching to Mac from Windows was a good call. I get a solid 12-18 hours of battery.
probably the best benchmark video out their. honestly the effort , time, energy, money, skill+expertise, is beyond 99.999% of people. You deserve a sub for that. well done
thanks, thanks to audio companies willing to provide me the sounds, at risk of leaking important secret maybe
To be fair many X Elite machines got OLED screens. Mac's mini LED displays are perhaps a little more efficient. HDR has a price.
This is the best video about battery performance I have ever seen on UA-cam. Thanks a lot!
i'd suggest checking out how geekerwan does his efficiency tests. Sometimes the battery figures from manufacturers arent perfectly accurate. And these chips will also have different efficiencies at different utilization. A proper power curve really paints the full picture for these chips.
What powercfg setting was used during the test? High performance? Ultimate? Battery saver, etc? Great video! Hoping we get another round of X Elite based machines; and also curious how they perform running arm64 Linux or arm64 freebsd
great battery tests i could say it definately represents real world usage keep making such videos !!!
btw were the refresh rate of windows machines were set to 120 or 60 during the tests?
I don't usually comment on videos, but I'm doing so to help increase its reach. Hats off to you for your hard work!
I appreciate that!
Finally someone with a testing methodology that goes beyond playing a youtube video for whatever hours.
I wonder how those X elites will stack up if on linux, where presumably you can accomplish a much greater degree of ARM optimizations (as all of the source is easily available to qualcomm engineers). On top of that due to android efforts I would assume that the entire platform should be more mature and welcoming to ARM / alternatives ISAs
you nailed it man, It's too good. Your tests are so accurate.
the only youtube channel does battery test in the right way.
Have to shout out your effort to come up with an innovating way of testing all those machines.. I totally agree that most of reviewers are testing in pretty generic ways, which can't be further for real life scenarios, so thanks for that, well done! :)
Wow! This is very thorough work, time and effort! No reviewer goes through this level of effort! Thank you for that! I was surprised with the results! The M3 Macbook Air is impressive!
Great analysis, really impressive. Huge appreciation for the amount of work to make such a high quality informative video like this. As for the Dell XPS, I noticed that the Intel Ultra version lasted about 1h30, whereas the Snapdragon lasted for about 5h. It's a huge difference (we know that Snapdragon should last more, but not to a margin of 230% increase). My assumption is that the Dell XPS Intel chip was higher resolution QHD+ or 3K OLED, whereas the Snapdragon version was a lower resolution (FHD+), just a guess, as this apparently was not described in the video.
Thank you for doing this. I've been waiting for a detailed set of battery life tests for a while now. Every other review just gives a nebulous number of hours, exactly as you stated.
Now I need to research the battery size and SOC of the Surface Pro 11 so I can correlate it to the data you have here.
Might do the same for the Asus Proart Z13 as well.
EDIT: SP11, SD X Plus, 46WHr battery. SL7, SD X Plus, 54WHrs.
Basic math, SP11 is 85% of the capacity. Duration is likely 85% of 330 mins. So 281 mins, or 4 hours and 40 mins vs. 330 mins or 5 hours 30 mins.
Not bad.
Finally a test of machines that represents real world use. Excellent job! Happy to see how well my old? M1 16" Pro held up. Thanks again for a great job!
Dude. Gracias! 🫶 Greetings from Mexico City ❤
de nada
"Superb explanation. Using charts and showing how the battery test was actually done was excellent work. The way you explained each and every point reminds me of my college professor. I will call you Professor Alex
Thank you for the detailed test, I've a better idea about the battery now, especially wrt performance. Now it's a choice of ecosystem, speaker and touch pad (which Macs are great for), price, and software compatibility (AutoCAD and Civil 3D don't work with Snapdragon until now). For me, if Autodesk gets out a version that works in Snapdragon, I'll go with those. But if money was not an issue, I'd go with the Macs (at least for now)
Great setup and review!
Glad you enjoyed it
I just want to say thank you. This is the absolute best battery test I've ever seen in my life!
I really like the approach to how you tested these machines but I have to ask, how did you control for screen brightness? I doubt they all have the same max brightness, but auto brightness would be a fair enough approach.
i set the brightness to max because that’s how I like it
man, you are the GOAT for sure, thanks a lot for your work!
The most underrated tech channel
Damn, who could have possibly gone through this much research to show us the actual performance of the batteries.
Alex should be the ultimate tester of these machines, nowadays.
Man, such a quality content... Lot of work here. Thanks!
Unlike many other viewers, you put in so much work and efforts for this video! Respect 👍
Just a question: I heard that SnapDragons were getting a drivers update (this week). Was this with test with that update?
Pretty cool test, thanks for this, that makes me feel quite good with the XPS 13 that is currently on the way over to me :) I think the XPS might even have another trick up its sleeve that wasn't really able to shine here: it has a VRR screen that goes down to 30 fps. So if you're not always doing something but just lulling about, reading or thinking about why ones code doesn't run, it will conserve even more battery
Thanks Alex. Though 2 points want to mention that should go into consideration in your test.
1. At 11:20 you mentioned that each loop was 30 mins hence the efficiency plots look similar but ideally the loops should be one piece of work done, so time to execute code, etc should be factored in and they can be almost 30 mins but more efficient machine would have been able to complete loop in slightly lesser time, this would make better efficiency comparison towards the end.
2. Wanted to hear that all Windows machines were set to max performance mode; as when all youtubers compare their performance with Apple M series they set them to max performance, but when comparing battery they let it compare on balanced mode. This is not fair, their battery should be tested at same performance level that is being compared with Macbooks.
Hope the input is useful in future videos. And agian thanks for testing these in fair and real world settings so thoroughly!
thanks for the input. the loop was 30 min precisely because some machines will be faster than others, but since we’re simulating humans, that shouldn’t matter.
I did mention that i set high performance on all the machines for this test.
Make sense, thanks a ton!
You won my subscription to your channel with this video. You put so much effort into your videos. You deserve all the fame.
Bro your videos is awesome! Never saw a tech UA-camr investing this much effort
I appreciate that!
The Best review tests. You deserve to be subscribed 😊
Dude, based on your last video comparing the power plans I thought that that battery benchmark will be on the balanced plan, and I was ready to get disappointed. but wow after you said that it was on the high-performance plan, that's a game changer.
On low and balanced performance how long do they last?
Please retest this is important.
fyi, you need to consider the battery age, as half-life for li battery starts when it ships. So better way is connect a power emulator instead of battery. Might be a bit destructive... but that'll get you the power consumption data.
That was a really fun way to visualize the benchmark. Nicely done!
Glad you liked it!
Always a delight to check out your videos. It's on one side well explained, technical but also fun to watch, funny overall. Thank you for doing it man, we love you.