Dell Latitude 6430u Ultrabook, All Business
Battery Life Testing
Part of the allure of an ultrabook is its ability to offer strong battery life in addition to great performance, so we make sure to see how long these systems can go when unplugged. To give you an idea of how long the Dell Latitude 6430u and its 6-cell, 60Wh battery will last and to help you compare its longevity to other systems, we ran two battery tests. For both tests, we set the screen's brightness to 50% and turned off all screen savers and sleep settings.
Keep in mind your usage patterns will significantly impact battery life. If you’re watching videos, downloading files, or putting the ultrabook in sleep mode when the system is not in use, this will impact the time your system can run before needing to recharge.
Our web browsing test is the same one we run on tablets and smartphones. This test is designed to show how long a system can handle simple Web browsing, and it refreshes a page every three minutes and runs until the system shuts down because the battery is depleted. We also use Battery Eater Pro, which runs a heavy workload continuously to show you what the system can do when its CPU, GPU, memory, and storage drive are seeing heavy use. If you plan to use the ultrabook to work with multimedia (or even to do a lot of word processing) the results will give you a picture of what to expect.
Keep in mind your usage patterns will significantly impact battery life. If you’re watching videos, downloading files, or putting the ultrabook in sleep mode when the system is not in use, this will impact the time your system can run before needing to recharge.
Our web browsing test is the same one we run on tablets and smartphones. This test is designed to show how long a system can handle simple Web browsing, and it refreshes a page every three minutes and runs until the system shuts down because the battery is depleted. We also use Battery Eater Pro, which runs a heavy workload continuously to show you what the system can do when its CPU, GPU, memory, and storage drive are seeing heavy use. If you plan to use the ultrabook to work with multimedia (or even to do a lot of word processing) the results will give you a picture of what to expect.
In the Battery Eater Pro test, the Latitude 6430u landed right in the middle of the pack at 142 minutes, which isn’t terrific. With a 6-cell battery inside, you might hope for more. In the more minimal Web browsing test, it did much better, essentially tying for first place with 414 minutes of life (which is nearly 7 hours).
