Dell XPS M1730: SLI, Penryn, and Overclocking
by Jarred Walton on February 28, 2008 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Battery Life and Power Use
For battery life testing, we ran our standard three in-house tests. The first consists of surfing the internet until the battery runs down. We set Internet Explorer to load three web pages (including AnandTech.com), pause for 60 seconds, exit, and then reload those pages. The second test simply plays a DVD until the battery runs dead. For the third test, we loop the four gaming tests in 3DMark06. In all cases, we set the power profile to "Balanced" and set the display brightness at maximum brightness. Given the amount of power already consumed by the M1730 GPUs, even turning off the backlight for the LCD won't help much. Still, if you're willing to turn down the brightness level you might be able to increase battery life by another ~5 minutes.
SLI 8800M GTX cards clearly need a lot of power, and with the X9000 CPU the M1730 consumes 15 to 20% more power than the Alienware m9750. That's when the system is plugged into the wall, however; running on battery power, CPU and GPU performance is throttled somewhat. The net result is that gaming battery life is about equal to the Alienware. Internet surfing and DVD playback on the other hand both suffer mightily. If ever there was a system that needs Hybrid SLI, this is it. Unfortunately, it sounds like Hybrid SLI won't be available in laptops until sometime later this year.
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FXi - Friday, February 29, 2008 - link
If folks are going to be told that a laptop performs extremely well, I think it would be fair to throw at least a single desktop system (mainstream enthusiast level, nothing over the top) into the charts for comparisons. I realize it could stunt the graphs a bit, but folks really need to understand what they are buying into with these machines, and all too often they think they are getting something that is 90% of a desktop's power, and that's rarely the case.If it breaks the grapsh too badly, throw a couple of graphs in the end of the article (much like you have a couple of pages dedicated to "overclocking performance") that give the fair comparison. I'm not saying that lappies aren't worth it, just people should be fully aware of what they are paying for.
7Enigma - Friday, February 29, 2008 - link
I would completely agree with you up until the conclusion of the article. I have never owned a laptop, and probably won't for quite some time. Because of this I don't follow the laptop-only parts (CPU/GPU/RAM/etc.) much and so thought, "This is a crazy fast laptop but I wonder how it compares to a Q6600 with 8800GTX".The conclusion really put the laptop in perspective for me. Basically its a top of the line desktop system from a year ago. That's all I needed to hear. I think it is quite a feat to have a laptop capable of performance a year behind current tech. Yes it is more desktop in a small form factor, but it is a easily portable computer that behaves like a very capable desktop system.
With all that said, I can't wait to build my new system after 3 years with my current un-upgraded one. Just waiting on the 45nm quads and the new 9800's to pull the trigger...
funky24 - Friday, February 29, 2008 - link
man they got the best job in the whole world do u keep all hardware u test here ,man that is one mean laptop would kill to have it lolPlasmaBomb - Monday, March 3, 2008 - link
Nope, they have to give it back :(Baked - Thursday, February 28, 2008 - link
This is totally necessary... You can probably murder somebody w/ the power brick if they try to take the "notebook" from you.PlasmaBomb - Thursday, February 28, 2008 - link
What size and rating does the power brick on this beast have?JarredWalton - Thursday, February 28, 2008 - link
It's the biggest power brick I've seen to date, rated at 230W output. So assuming ~80% efficiency, even at the maximum load with overclocking it still has some remaining capacity. Heck, the power brick probably weighs as much as a Mac Air! ;)PlasmaBomb - Saturday, March 1, 2008 - link
Cheers for the info, any chance of a piccy?It must get rather hot, if indeed it's 80% efficient it is dumping 50W when drawing 260W from the plug!
JarredWalton - Sunday, March 2, 2008 - link
Image added. And it could be less than 80% efficient, but the point is the laptop uses nearly as much power as an entry level desktop with discrete graphics.Direct link to image:
http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/mobile/2008/de...">One big power brick
PlasmaBomb - Monday, March 3, 2008 - link
Cheers for the pics, good job btw :)