New Thinkpad X32 & X41 Power usage

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Eule · #1 Post by **Eule** » Sun Apr 10, 2005 11:38 am

Hi everyone,

just looked up the facs sheets for the new ibm x series and saw something suprisingly unhappy! The new X41 max. runtime with an 8-cell battery is only 5.7hrs! This is same as the X32 as the sheets says. I dont really unterstand this, since this means that the x32 with a 6-cell battery runs as long as x41 with a lv-cpu and a 8-cell battery pack.

anybody knows if this is just an error or any explanations? if the runtime really goes down that much i'll have to think about buying the x40 and then all the waiting was for no reason

Thx

Eule

#2 Post by **K. Eng** » Sun Apr 10, 2005 11:58 am

I think there's probably a mistake on the X32 spec, but as far as I know the 5.7 hour figure is accurate for the X40.

The Sonoma platform seems to have higher power consumption than the original Centrino, due to the higher clock rates on the CPUs and faster front side bus.

IMO there's not too much functional difference between the X40 and the X41, aside from the fingerprint reader. If you want the longer battery life go with the X40.

Eule · #3 Post by **Eule** » Sun Apr 10, 2005 12:05 pm

Yea thats what i thought too, but i kinda fell in love the fingerprint reader...i know it now any really useful but that just the it is with love...

does somebody know how the x32 runtimes then are?

#4 Post by **K. Eng** » Wed Apr 13, 2005 1:10 pm

You can probably estimate the X32 runtime based on the difference in battery size, since both the X32 and X41 will use the same chipset. The X32 also uses faster hard drives and processors, so my best guess is about 70% the runtime of an X41 with 8-cell, or about 4 hours.

Scud · #5 Post by **Scud** » Thu Apr 14, 2005 10:32 am

I don't the X32 and X41 will share the same chipset. The faster memory bus and execute bit disable support are missing from the X32

rayfranco · #6 Post by **rayfranco** » Thu Apr 14, 2005 1:56 pm

Look again.

The X32 battery has been upgrade from 4.4 AH to 4.8 AH and the avg. time from 5.7 hrs to 6.1 hrs.

The X32 still uses the older Intel 855 chipset. And the older memory controller, which limits its access time to main memory to 266 MHz. The X41 uses the newer Intel 915 chipset, and it accesses its main memory at 400 MHz.

The slow memory access of the X32 may be a potential bottleneck, and the slow 1.8 inch hard drive of the X41 is probably its bottleneck. I would like to find the executive that chose the fingerprint reader over the standard 2.5 inch hard drive for the X41.

#7 Post by **K. Eng** » Thu Apr 14, 2005 2:44 pm

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... -59161#arc

Video chipsets:

* Intel(R) Graphics Media Accelerator 900 chipset
* 16MB of memory integrated on chip

There's contradictory information. It says that the X32 uses a GMA900 accelerator, implying that it uses a 900 series PCIe chipset. However, it then talks about a 16 MB Mobility Radeon.

If the X32 is using the 855, as some of the video and memory specs suggest, then battery life will be around 6 hours due to the larger battery.

rayfranco wrote:Look again.

The X32 still uses the older Intel 855 chipset. And the older memory controller, which limits its access time to main memory to 266 MHz. The X41 uses the newer Intel 915 chipset, and it accesses its main memory at 400 MHz.

[/quote]

rayfranco · #8 Post by **rayfranco** » Thu Apr 14, 2005 5:13 pm

Has the X32 been officially announced or not? If appears that you can order one via the IBM Visa/Mastercard/AmExp pages.

If the X32 has the 915 chipset, DDR2 memory and GMA900 graphics, I would order one. Otherwise, I'm going to have to carry around a T43 in order to get both the faster DDR2 memory and a decent hard drive.

I know you do not need a fast processor or fast hard drive for surfing the web and word processing. However, a lappy will only feel zippy if it has a decent boot time, and it loads programs relatively fast.

I would appreciate any comments about the 1.8" drive in the X40 or X41. Is it the IBM software that makes it slow booting, and how fast does it load programs such as Adobe Acrobat.

#9 Post by **aamsel** » Fri Apr 15, 2005 1:05 am

The 1.8" drive is just slower overall. Basically, it is slower than the slowest 4200rpm drive, which is slower than the 4200rpm 2.5" drives, which in turn is slower than a 4200rpm desktop drive.

For me, with a clean install, it was slow booting. However, I prefer notebooks with 7200rpm 60GB Hitachi's.

Adobe Acrobat doesn't take all that long to load. I tried it on my T42 and on my desktop which has a 10,000rpm WD Raptor. The load time was not significant enough to bother timing it.

The best way to explain it is:
Fast hard drives (as long as you have enough memory) make everything seem faster and just make the whole system seem a lot zippier. CPU's are unlikely to be a huge bottleneck, since people run on battery at a fraction of the rated speed. If you have 512MB to 1GB of RAM, the remaining bottleneck is going to be the hard drive.

When PC's used to run DOS, you could run ramdisks and run entire programs from RAM without ever hitting a hard drive for data. I used to (in the DOS days) have 3 or 4 programs loaded into RAM, and it worked great.

Windows XP, however, will not run from RAM. Any way you slice it, and regardless of what settings you tweak, XP hits hard drives all of the time.

A faster hard drive just means a notebook/desktop that performs quicker.

Andrew
Austin, TX

rayfranco wrote:...I would appreciate any comments about the 1.8" drive in the X40 or X41. Is it the IBM software that makes it slow booting, and how fast does it load programs such as Adobe Acrobat.