Many Zephyrus owners wonder about the battery life if they’d install Linux. Some report that it is about the same as on Windows, while others see much longer usage. Today, it just so happened that I left the BIOS screen up for a while during which the battery quickly charged itself up to 100%.
I then opened a YouTube video in Firefox and maximized the browser by double-clicking the top bar. Then, I started the YouTube video in default view (not full screen) which takes up as much screen space as YouTube allows while playing at 1080p. Precisely at 7:59 PM, I started to play the video and kept an eye on the time, battery usage, and heat sensor.
Heat sensor
Before playing the video, the CPU temperature was 31 degrees Celsius which is about 88 Fahrenheit.
A minute later, the temperature rose to 33 degrees and after an additional 10 minutes, settled in between 35 and 36 degrees.
Battery life
The first 10 minutes of video playback kept the battery percentage at the full 100% mark. After that, it slowly decreased but not in a linear fashion. Sometimes the battery lost one percent after two minutes and other times it took four or more minutes to lose one percent.
After one hour and 20 minutes, the battery charge showed 76%. Again, the Zephyrus has a 1440p 15.5″ display with a 165Hz refresh rate, and based on that 80-minute sample, I think that it’s safe to say that one could comfortably watch three full-length movies on a plain trip and have some juice left over to pen some emails and jot down some notes.
As always, there is a margin of error consideration; but all in all, I liked what I saw. When I have some more time, I will run a similar test, and if the results differ in some noticeable way then I’ll update this post.
