Dell Studio 17: When Gaming Isn't Enough

Battery Life in a Desktop Replacement

If you aren't expecting much out of the battery of the Dell Studio 17, you're probably right not to. This is a massive 17-inch notebook; in addition to feeding that large screen, the battery also has to power a processor with a 45W TPD and mainstream-class mobile graphics. Dell seems to have been cognizant of this in opting to ship the Studio 17 with a 9-cell battery standard (a 6-cell battery that sits flush with the unit is also available.) Let's see how it fares.

In practice, Dell is able to get far more running time out of this notebook than we expected they would. While it's true that this notebook has the advantage of a 9-cell battery, its relative battery life is nonetheless quite good given the components inside and larger screen. Dell has managed to get a 17" screen, 45W Intel mobile quad-core, and a decent GPU to produce battery life comparable to AMD machines running off of integrated graphics: no mean feat to be sure. Granted, AMD's latest Danube and Nile platforms improve the situation, but Clarksfield processors have never been very battery friendly.

The only question mark is really just how important this kind of useful battery life is on a machine this big. Sure, it's great that it can handle surfing the internet for more than four hours, but the thing weighs nearly eight pounds, and it's mighty wide. The best case I can suggest is that it would be useful for any kind of on-the-go media work, where you need a monitor or just powerful hardware that can run on the battery for a substantial amount of time.