Alienware 13 R2 Gaming Laptop And Graphics AMP Review

Name: Alienware 13 R2
Brand: Alienware

by Paul Lilly — Sunday, January 10, 2016, 12:52 PM EDT

Power Consumption And Battery Life

Page 8: Power Consumption And Battery Life

Gaming laptops aren't really designed for long battery life, but that doesn't we mean we should ignore it altogether. As we do with all laptops we review, we ran our usual battery benchmarks consisting of Battery Eater Pro to see how long the laptop can last when heavily taxed, and our web browsing test for those times when you're not gaming.

As for power consumption, we measured 12W from the wall when idle and 94W when stressing both the CPU (Prime 95) and GPU (Furmark).

Battery Life

Heavy and Light Loads

The Alienware 13 R2 fought the good fight for just over two hours before waving the white flag to exhaustion. This is one of those areas where combining a slower clocked (and dual-core) Skylake processor with a lower end mobile GPU (GeForce GTX 960M) pays dividends. Compared to the more muscular ASUS G752VT-DH72 that we recently reviewed, the Alienware 13 R2 lasted a full 45 minutes longer.

Alienware 13 R2 Web Browsing Battery Test

The Alienware also distanced itself from other gaming laptops in our web browsing test, more than doubling the run time in some cases. It's not in the top half of the chart because of the systems here are Ultrabooks, ultrathins, and 2-in-1 devices designed for maximum portability, but for a gaming laptop, staying awake for over 5 hours is pretty good.