Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Surface Session Ep16 – Surface Book battery test for music production”.
Hello, I’m Robin Vincent and welcome to another surface session. Today I am testing battery life. So what I’ve got is my surface book and I’ve tried to sort of create some kind of musical environment so that we can test how well the battery survives when running music software and music hardware personally are not particularly in to running surfaces on battery. I prefer to stay plugged in because I want everything kind of available to me. I’M not one of those i’m sitting on the bus getting out and an almost laptop and having a bit of a play. No, that’s not really me. I prefer to have things plugged in i like a powered hub, all that sort of thing, but a lot of people do ask me what the battery life is like, and so i thought it was important to give some kind of real practical demonstration.
So here we are, it also gives an opportunity to test kind of the stability of the system over a longer period of time, because i don’t always sit here for hours just looking at it. So the plan is very simple: I’ve got an able to live project loaded, a pretty beefy one. That’S going to tax the processor. I’Ve got an audio interface plugged in via USB I’ve got a MIDI keyboard plug in x, USB both powered by the surface book.
I’M just going to put out the plug set, the timer set it running and see how long it takes for it to get down to that kind of six percent. Oh, my god critical battery alarm, I’m also going to be setting an appreciator going on the base station, which is going to be constantly running into Asian life, just to sort of put data into the system so that it’s not just doing the same thing. Over and over again, particularly, it’s also still receiving data as well as playing back. You know, I’m just trying to sort of emulate the playing of a keyboard over a period of time into the surface book as running on battery you get it. I think so rarely go go, so that’s two devices plugged into the USB be empowered.
First, one is the fast track duo, audio interface and the other one is the base station to base station is playing and appreciated, latched bunch of notes out to live here on channel one. The rest of the project is playing with a whole load of synth and reactors. Loaded processor is running it around. Sixty percent. It’S running on battery current battery life is one hundred percent.
We will check back in a little while about 25 minutes in look over here. At the battery say, we’ve got about two hours, 23 minutes remaining interesting. Okay, we’re an hour and a quarter in everything’s still playing playback is still completely fine and down. Here we are on thirty-nine percent. It says okay, an hour 19.
I did just get a glitch. Now this is still playing down here. Thirty-Seven percent up here the cpu usage – has gone up a little bit high. In fact it just peaked, then again, so I imagine at this point the CPU has stepped down a little bit. Yes, you can see. The processor has stepped down a little bit 2.1, as opposed to previously being a 2.4 or 2.8 normally, but it is still hanging together. So i’m going to leave that running.
Okay, it’s getting towards two hours and we’ve got the ten percent battery. It’S given us a little triangle saying look out you’re under ten percent battery CPU level is still rocking around the same, somewhat expenditure have gone down any further. I almost bang on two hours we hit the six percent running low limit, so the system very shortly is going to want to start shutting itself down. That says we have eight minutes remaining and I don’t think it’s going to be that long at all. Let’S give it some power, shall we poor thing ye today go a couple of hours? It’S not too bad is it whole thing was flying everything going on data in later out, audio playing running to bits of hardware and audio interface, and a keyboard all running on battery two hours did lose a little bit of CPU after a while. It sort of clock down to about 2.1 gigahertz, as opposed to the normal 2.4 2.8, that I see when running it on the power. So you’re not going to be wanting to run a project like I was at about sixty percent because it’s going to creep up as time goes on, but other than that it didn’t photo is still completely stable.
Nothing funny went on, there’s no crashing or weirdness it. Just crackled a bit when there, when the sign came up to tell us at those bugger-all battery wrecked and of course you can add on a couple more minutes for those last percentages of battery life. I have nothing else to say about it.
There you go. I hope that’s helpful, that’s the Microsoft Surface book. I seven not the performance-based, not the one, with the new added batteries in it.
This is the regular vanilla, flavored one with the nvidia graphics. I 7 16 gigs of ram running a bunch of stuff on batteries. For a couple of hours there you go now go and make some tunes .