Gaming: I Ditched My Laptop Charger For A Day Of Travel, Work And Gaming...

Gaming laptop battery life is, by and large, rubbish. Or rather, trying to use a gaming-capable machine for a full day of work without charging it is, err, rubbish. I've hauled many discrete GPU-equipped lappys into the office for a spot of real-world testing, and most of them are usually begging to be plugged into a wall socket by lunchtime.

Upon hearing Intel's battery life efficiency claims for its new, Panther Lake-based, Core Ultra Series 3 chips, I knew what needed to be done. Top up my Asus Zenbook Duo review sample overnight, take it on my round trip from my Southampton home to PC Gamer Towers in Bath (a roughly 126 mile jaunt), use it for a regular day, and record when it conks out.

It's a dGPU-less machine, which means all the graphics hardware is contained onboard the single Core Ultra X9 388H chip at its heart. Despite this, the built-in Arc B390 iGPU delivers some impressive gaming performance for its size, meaning that laptops powered by Intel's new mobile chips (the ones with chonky iGPUs, anyway) can now reasonably be called gaming laptops.

Intel says that Core Ultra Series 3 machines can boast up to 27-hour battery life, but my Asus sample is a bit different. It's got dual OLED displays for a start, which means my testing had to take into account the uniqueness of the particular design. I resolved myself to only use the extra screen for demonstration purposes and the odd photo shoot, to try and gain an indicative figure of what you might expect from a more regularly-formatted laptop.

Which, according to Asus, should give me a maximum battery figure of 18 hours+ under ideal conditions. Setting off on the train that morning, though, I wasn't too confident. I'd initially planned to leave the tiny USB-C charging brick at home, but a last minute panic meant I threw it in the bottom of my bag anyway. Call if a lack of faith, if you will.

I started out by checking my emails using the terrible on-train Wi-Fi, along with a news search for our regular coverage. This involves multiple tabs, browser windows, and the odd bit of YouTube watching. Arriving at the office around two hours later, I anxiously checked the battery indicator.

92%. A pretty good start for the Panther Lake lappy, although roughly what I expected. Brandishing the shiny new machine in front of my colleagues, it was then briefly handed around the group for some cooing and cawing. The dual screens were flipped open and fiddled with, and the magnetically-attached keyboard was en

Source: PC Gamer