HP Mini 311: Netbooks get ION

HP Mini 311 — Power Requirements

As a corollary to the battery life tests, we also performed measurements of power requirements using the AC adapters and a Kill-A-Watt device. These numbers are only accurate to the nearest Watt, so a difference of 1W (i.e. from rounding) could obscure more than a 10% actual difference in power requirements. Also note that things change somewhat when you switch to DC power, so the battery life tests are a better indication of true power requirements.

As usual, we see most of the battery life results reflected in our power measurements. At idle the Mini 311 uses 9W compared to 8W for the other recent netbooks. With the CPU under full load, the power draw increases to 17W while the other netbooks range from 12W for the ASUS 1005HA up to 15W for the M1022. The ASUS is obviously more effective at conserving power with the CPU under load. In our graphics test (essentially full load as 3DMark will stress both the CPU and GPU), the Mini 311 consumes substantially more power than most other netbooks, but that's due in large part to the fact that the ION LE (9400M) graphics are pretty much an order of magnitude faster than the GMA 950.