Gateway P-6831 FX: Best Midrange Gaming Notebook Ever
by Jarred Walton on March 28, 2008 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Battery Life, Power Use, Temperatures, and Noise
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. The GPU on the P-6831 still consumes quite a bit of power, so turning down the backlight for the LCD won't help too much. However, you might be able to improve battery life by 20-25 minutes with a bit of effort (i.e. use the max power saving profile and turn down LCD brightness).
Related to battery life are the power requirements. We measure with the system plugged in, so some of the power saving features are not active. The numbers below will still give you an idea of how much relative power various tasks require.
The Gateway system comes with an 86 Whr battery, in comparison to 95 Whr batteries on several of the other 17" systems and 65 Whr on the AVADirect and WidowPC laptops. The P-6831 places near the top of the battery life benchmarks, at least when compared to other gaming notebooks. Reducing the display brightness and performance mode should easily allow over two hours of battery life for web surfing. DVD playback is just over an hour and a half, so you could watch some shorter movies on a single charge. The gaming battery life falls behind several of the other notebooks, but then it appears that the GPU clock speeds don't throttle as far on the P-6831 FX. That's likely because the CPU isn't using a lot of power, relatively speaking.
Those worried about extremely high temperatures should be pleasantly surprised. While we won't go so far as to call the P-6831 a cool-running laptop, it doesn't get all that hot. After looping 3DMark06 for over an hour, we measured the following temperatures. The exhaust on the back left of the laptop was by far the hottest area, measuring 46-48C. While that seems high, all of that heat comes from the GPU, and the bottom of the laptop is nowhere near that hot. The bottom ranges in temperature from 26C to 36C, with most of the surface around 31C-33C; only a few hotpoints (right near the center under the Gateway label, presumably where the actual GPU sits) reach 35-36C. The palm rest stays at a cool 26-30C, and the keyboard is mostly in the 30-32C range, with a few areas (around RTY/FGH - again just above the GPU core) reaching up to 35C. Note that all of the testing was conducted in a ~21C environment; temperatures would naturally be higher if the ambient temperature increases.
One last item we would like to comment on is the noise levels of this notebook. Given the slightly less powerful GPU and the slower CPU, we figured the noise levels would be lower than other gaming notebooks. Compared to the Clevo M570RU, that's certainly the case; the maximum noise level of 42dB is about the same as the minimum noise level (41dB) of the Clevo. The GPU and CPU still require decent airflow, though, so even at idle noise levels never reach the point where we would call this notebook "silent". It fluctuates between 34dB and 36dB at idle, with the difference coming from the CPU fan spinning faster for short periods of time. At 100% CPU load, the noise stays at a constant 36dB. As soon as you load up any game, noise increases to 40dB initially and then usually reaches the maximum 42dB after a few minutes. Again, we have to give Dell credit, as even with SLI their XPS M1730 is nearly silent when idle (31dB).
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ToeJuice - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
Nevermind... overreacted to the first page... lolbill3 - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
Would you make a gaming laptop your only machine? A 9600GT caliber GPU sounds nice now, but in just a few months as always it will be slipping way behind.It's hard enough keeping up to gaming specs on a desktop, seems to me a fixed spec laptop is always a losers choice for gaming.
gerf - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
I use my laptop for all computer uses outside of work. I consider it gaming able as well: Dell Vostro 1500 1.6GHz C2D, 8600m 512MB only DDR2, 2GB RAM, 85WHr battery. With the discounts of the day, 3 year warranty and a bag thrown in, it was about $1050.What mattered the most was that I get about 5 hours battery life when I'm just running moz, irc, IM, Thunderbird around the house.
I'm not a Dell employee, but I have to say that this type of lapper could be grouped up there as a reasonable alternative for moderate gamers on the go.
JarredWalton - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
That sort of system is a standard laptop first and a gaming laptop second. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but if you really like games and want to be able to run at maximum detail, that type of system won't cut it. That's what I'm getting at in the conclusion: the need for balance as well as targeting what type of system you want. If you want long battery life, the 8800M notebooks are currently a poor choice. I'm still waiting to see the first notebooks with HybridPower, so that you can get both 3D performance *and* long battery life.pmonti80 - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
For the kind of people who read anandtech, that laptop is not going to be their only computer. It's a second or third computer, like a desktop pc you can move or if you go to a LAN party, used for such things.And for the kind of people not reading anandtech this mobile equivalent of a 9600 GT is more that OK for a couple of years. At the native resolution of 1440x900 they would be able to play any game for 2 or more, just reducing the settings used as games demand more power (1440x900 is just a few less pixels than 1280x1024).
Just my 2 cents.
iclicku - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
I actually bought this laptop to leave at my GF's place so that when I'm over there, I can play games and such. Plus my GF loves to use it as well. I already have a desktop at home and the specs are very similar to the laptop.FXi - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
Nice review. It's very nice to see a notebook that enters the market at a kinder price point (even fully loaded it's far better than Dell or Alienware 17" gaming models).Drivers! Seriously anyone who isn't "working with" Nvidia hand in hand right now to get regular driver updates for mobile gaming machines is going to be out of this business when those updates start showing up. SLI absolutely requires serious regular driver updates, and the minute those updates stop (you stop getting supported) your SLI rig is not a single gpu rig in any future games. Kinda sad, eh?
The TN panel is a bit of a compromise, but folks should seriously consider that the price for what you get is pretty good. One can always move up several thousand and not get dramatically more performance. A cpu upgrade would probably be the only thing most folks might consider paying more for.
Well done :)
pmonti80 - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
It's a pitty that I live in spain and can't buy this notebook. Because I would buy it without a second thought if Gateway sold these here.Great for Lan's and as a Desktop Replacement. For a decent price.