Dell XPS M1730: SLI, Penryn, and Overclocking

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.