Dell Studio 14: Defining Solid

Studio 14 Battery Life

So far, our review unit has shown us solid performance in applications and about the best performance we could ask for in gaming (given the lousy options presented), but an increasingly important metric these days is battery life. We expect good things out of the Studio 14: the high capacity 6-cell, 56Wh battery should be able to get us at least four hours of useful life out of the notebook.

Getting close to three hours of movie playback time is pretty reasonable; in fact it starts scraping under machines with integrated graphics and bigger batteries. Under internet usage it gets even better, with the Studio 14 pulling nearly five hours of useful life at a comfortable brightness. Dell's done their homework here: the battery life on our Studio 14 is miles ahead of their last generation. The exception to that statement is x264 playback, where the old 9400M IGP of the 14z surpasses the new 14, though it had a larger battery. Note that on a per Wh metric, the 14z scored 2.92 compared to 2.86 on the 14, so it's pretty close even in that case. The dedicated graphics may be extremely low-powered but the chip still draws more power than the integrated graphics would have, and there's no indication that the Studio 14 is switching between the two.

Given the excellent running time from the stock 6-cell battery, we feel comfortable recommending users who need more than five hours of life opting for the 9-cell. Dell's site suggests that extended battery can last for up to eight hours and thirty-five minutes (how delightfully specific), and it's reasonable to assume they aren't far off the mark.