For our battery test we ran continuous loops of PCMark05 and expected that Penryn would have a small advantage so it came as a real surprise to see battery life increase from 56 minutes with the T7800 to one hour seven minutes with the T9500. That’s about 20 per cent which is simply startling for nothing more than a processor change.

Battery Life Results

Battery run-time in Minutes
Longer bars are better

As a rule of thumb you should double those battery life figures to get an estimated real-world figure as we hammered the battery without mercy during the run-down.

It was noticeable that the CPU cooling fan would operate in fits and starts even when the laptop was under a light load, running just the Windows desktop. It seemed that the fan ran less often with the T9500 than with the T7800, and while that’s a personal judgement the noise of the Rock was less annoying with the Penryn installed.

Better battery life with Penryn than with Merom

Related Reviews

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• Nvidia nForce 790i Ultra SLI chipset
• AMD 780G integrated DirectX10.1 chipset
• Intel Skulltrail high-end gaming system
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• Rock Xtreme X770 laptop with Nvidia GeForce 8800M graphics
• Intel 'Penryn' Core 2 Extreme QX9770 and X48 chipset

Best of all we cannot see a downside to mobile Penryn. It’s all good news.

Verdict

Mobile Penryn may seem like a minor update to Merom and, indeed, the increase in performance the new 45nm part offers is small. However, Penryn delivers a very welcome boost to battery life.