MSI Wind U115 Hybrid runs for over 13 hours on single charge

The MSI Wind U115 netbook was announced at CES in January with a promised battery life of 10.5 hours on a 9-cell 5200mAh battery. This long battery life was touted as a result of a combination of a 160GB hard drive and a 8GB SSD. The U115 is powered by a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom Z530 CPU. However, according to some battery tests by EeePC.de, it seems that those MSI battery claims may actually be conservative.

The test was run in Battery Eater Classic, which continuously calculates the decimals of Pi until the CPU is at 100-percent, as well as running 3D graphics tests. As for netbook settings, the U115 was switched to 30-percent brightness, using SSD only (rather than the HDD) and WiFi turned off. This yielded a battery life of 13 hours and 15 minutes. More tests are planned, this time testing how long it would last with WLAN turned on, which would provide more real-world results. However, given the impressive 13-hour run time, we would expect at least ten hours with WiFi switched on.

Now, from reading the article, it is still unclear whether a 9-cell or 6-cell battery was used in the test. I imagine it is indeed the 9-cell battery, although it is worth remembering that this is unlikely to be sold as standard with the Wind U115 Hybrid. However, if these results are representative of final units then even a 6-cell battery is likely to yield a battery life of over 7 hours in the real world.