Thinkpads Forum

Is anyone else getting the feeling that the new Santa Rosa X61/s laptops offer less battery life than the older X60/s? From the few reviews and user experiences that have popped up so far, I see no indication of that battery life would increase on the Santa Rosa platform, which I believe was one of the arguments advertised for.

For example, the new low voltage core 2 duo in the x61s seems to have a higher TDP, as well as higher default stock voltage when running on the lowest multiplier, compared to the low voltage core duo that x60s uses.

Wikipedia have lists:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_In ... processors

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_In ... processors

I know the powermanagement on the Santa Rosa platform is supposed to be better, but again, I have seen no indication of increased battery life yet. Maybe it is too early too tell...

If you want to compare Santa Rosa platform to the Napa platform, you should really stay with comparable CPUs. And the L7400 in the X60s has the same TDP* as L7500 in the X61s in spite of the latter's 100 MHz clock-speed increase.

With the addition of the BatteryStretch technology, Lenovo has increased the battery life ratings from 8.4h on the X60s to 9.0h on the X61s (I have not see independent benchmarks yet). That's a 7% increase, not stunning, but still worthwhile.

Note that many of the anecdotal X61/X61s battery life complaints compare a new X61/s system with more memory (which consumes power, too) running Vista to an older X60/s with less memory and Windows XP. Not an apples-apples comparison.

* Note that TDP in itself doesn't tell you what the power consumption (let alone battery life!) of a processor is. TDP is the CPU's maximum power envelope at full performance and utilization, and is published so that system designers can design sufficient cooling for the CPUs. Minimum and typical power consumption is much different from TDP.