Netflix is my new no-lie laptop battery test

If you were to take a laptop on a plane or away for a ski weekend, how long would it last streaming Netflix before it ran out of battery? It’s a good question, and one that deserves an answer.

I’ve tested Intel’s Core Ultra 200 (Lunar Lake) and Intel’s Core Ultra 300 (Panther Lake) while looking at representative laptops for work, not play. But the streaming question is one that’s nagged at me, for some time, and I was determined to answer it. I did, with what I’m calling the “One Piece” benchmark.

One Piece, an anime about a group of pirates looking for a legendary treasure, has literally hundreds of episodes streaming on Netflix. It was a perfect opportunity to pull out the representative laptops I’d used to test Intel’s Lunar Lake and Panther Lake chips, alongside Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and AMD’s Ryzen AI 300. Which laptop would stream it the longest before conking out? It literally took days to accomplish, but we arrived at a clear winner — especially when we calculated which mobile platform was the most power-efficient.

I’m not sure that we’ll add the “One Piece benchmark” to our standard repertoire of testing, for reasons that I’ll outline, below. But it’s also true that I don’t think that the current crop of battery benchmarks accurately represents real-world battery life, either, and the “One Piece” benchmark tries to establish something closer to a true baseline for battery testing. Plus it was kind of fun, too!

If you don’t care why we test, skip down to the charts below. We’ll give you the details on which laptop platform has the best battery life while streaming.

Otherwise, let me nerd out for a bit on our testing philosophy, and why I performed these tests.

For me, long battery life is more synonymous with a trade show like CES, where I’m always on the run between meetings, taking notes where I can, and with nary a wall outlet in sight. That’s why my existing tests include the UL Procyon productivity benchmark, which tries to simulate how a user might use Microsoft 365 apps like Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel across a marathon work day.

The Procyon tests perform various “work”-like tasks; opening documents, performing Excel calculations, et cetera. The benchmark also pauses for a while, here and there, to simulate you taking a break. It doesn’t push the laptop as hard as I’d like, but it still offers a decent estimate of how long the laptop will last if you were using it to work.

Cribbing from my Core Ultra 200 (Lunar Lake) review, I came up with these battery-life results when the Procyon productivity test was run. Interestingly, Intel’s just-released Panther Lake platform produced a duration of 13 hours 12 minutes before expiring, which puts it in the midrange of the the mobile platforms tested below.

That’s productivity. Our traditional battery-life video test hearkens back to the days in which people might download several movies on to their laptop, and then watch them during a transcontinental flight. Today, we’ve lost touch with that lifestyle: streaming is practically ubiquitous, and many planes include power plugs, too.

Our traditional video playback test is both useful and outdated. We loop a 4K video until the battery expires. That’s not unrealistic, but it’s not the way consumers consume video anymore. CPU designers have also begun isolating video decoding in certain regions of the CPU, and then turning off the other sections of the CPU. There’s nothing wrong with this, obviously! But my gut says that video decoding has become “easier” over time, while also becoming a more artificial test than in years past. So it was time to try something new.

A good test also tries to isolate the issue at hand, such as the CPU performance. But battery-life is clearly dependent upon what you’re doing, the processor, how bright the display is, and so on.

I can and did artificially set the backlight brightness at a fixed level, though many laptops are set (by default) to adjust the brightness depending on content. But there are many other variables: the type of Wi-Fi adapter being used, for example, and how congested the network is. I tried to avoid updates by turning updates off. A streaming service like Netflix or YouTube might subtly adjust the bandwidth or even the resolution depending upon the network bandwidth, too. So it’s not a perfect test; there are variables.

Still, streaming Netflix is very much what users do, and repeating the test multiple times can average those issues out — which I did, running each test three times. I streamed at 1080p resolution, as that’s the resolution of the Netflix standard plan. Subtitles were turned on.

Of course, the other problem is just the time such tests take! Every test took well over twelve hours to run, repeated thrice, and with each laptop. Even sitting in the corner of the office, the One Piece benchmark wasn’t something that you could just run on a weekend. I didn’t want to run the tests in parallel, for risk of affecting the streams, and Netflix only allows you to stream so many streams in parallel, anyway.

But we do have results! For the purposes of this test, I hauled out our test laptops representing all three major processor platforms, plus the older Intel Core Ultra 200 series (Lunar Lake) for good measure. Note that AMD’s Ryzen AI 400 and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chips are expected soon; we just don’t have any platforms to test those just yet.

I charged up each laptop to a full charge, then let the laptops keep streaming episodes of One Piece, one segueing into the next, until the battery expired.

The results were pretty clear: Intel’s Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) was still the king of streaming but Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite was close on its heels. Put another way, Panther Lake lasted 16 hours 33 minutes, followed by the Snapdragon laptop at 15 hours 23 minutes. Intel’s older Lunar Lake platform lasted 14 hours 19 minutes, while the laptop powered by AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 chip lasted 11 hours 57 minutes.

But wait! There’s another variable: the battery. Plonking down a 99Wh battery inside a laptop will extend any laptop’s battery life by an enormous amount. Fortunately, another variable, the resolution of the display, is uniform in three of the laptops. Qualcomm gets a slight advantage here, however, as the Surface Laptop is pushing about 60 percent of the pixels of the others.

Still, if you divide the battery life in minutes by the battery capacity in Watt-hours, you end up with a better picture of the actual efficiency of each mobile laptop processor platform. And the results are definitive. The most efficient platform in terms of battery life is clearly the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and its Arm architecture.

So what have we learned?

The conclusion sets my mind at ease: for now, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X1 Elite is still the clear winner in terms of battery life, even against Intel’s latest-and greatest Panther Lake chip. It also suggests what would happen if for some reason a laptop maker chose to bundle the same massive 99Wh battery Intel enjoys: you would be able to use it for multiple days. That’s the efficiency of Windows on Arm at work.

For now, if you want a laptop with the longest battery life, make sure it has a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip inside it. That, or tote around an extra pound of battery attached to an “Intel Inside” logo.