Dell XPS M1710 - GeForce Go 7900 GTX 512 Mobile Gaming, Part 1

Battery Life

We don't have any comparison results for this section, though we hope to flesh out our laptop comparisons in the future with additional products. While it would be nice to get eight hours of battery life and high-performance gaming in a laptop, that won't be possible without much larger battery capacities (at least for now). We left everything set up with the default settings, which means the CPU can range from 1.0 GHz to 2.16 GHz depending on demand. NVIDIA's PowerMizer technology is listed among the features as well, and that should help to keep battery life up when you're not running 3D applications. Once you fire up a game, however, you shouldn't expect to get several hours of gaming from the 80 WHr battery.

For battery testing we plugged in the laptop until it showed 100% battery power and then ran three different applications until the system entered hibernation mode (3% battery life). DVD playback is pretty straightforward, and we started playing back a DVD with headphones plugged in to simulate typical use. Similar to DVD playback with a twist, we timed battery life while watching a DivX encoded movie, again using headphones. (The movie was the same as the DVD, encoded at full WS resolution.) We wanted to see if constant access to the DVD drive had a noticeable impact on battery life. Finally, to simulate gaming, we ran a continuous loop of 3DMark05 (the three game demos, not the CPU tests). We found that 3DMark05 generally uses a bit more power than most real games, so it should serve as a worst-case scenario.



Our suspicion that the DVD-ROM drive consumes a reasonable amount of power is proved true with the DivX playback result. If you're the type to encode your DVDs to DivX and leave them on your hard drive for easy retrieval, you can potentially increase battery life by as much as 28% according to our results. That also means you should have enough battery life to get through most current films, whereas the two hours of battery life may not quite make it to the end of some DVDs.

As for gaming performance, an hour and a half isn't terrible, but it's not that great either. You'll definitely want to keep the system plugged in if you plan on a lengthy gaming session. Although perhaps it's a good way to keep your gaming limited to 90 minutes or less at a time?