Alienware 13 OLED Laptop Review: 13 Inches Of Gorgeous
Alienware 13 OLED Battery Life And Acoustics
Battery Life And How We Test:
In the following benchmarks we employ two very different battery life tests--Battery Eater Pro and a custom 1080p HD video loop test--to prove out battery life with our test group of machines and the Alienware 13 OLED. In all tests, Windows 10 Quiet Hours have been enabled and displays are calibrated with lux meters on pure white screens to as close to 115 lux as possible. For the average notebook this is somewhere between a 45 - 60% brightness setting. Since notebook displays significantly affect power consumption and battery life, it's important to ensure a level playing field with respect to brightness of the display for battery testing. However, since many notebook displays vary in brightness at each respective brightness setting in Windows, this calibration with the meter is also critical to ensure all displays are set to as near identical brightness as possible before testing. |
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We've just completed our final battery life tests with the Alienware 13 OLED and have both heavy load (Battery Eater Pro) and light duty workload numbers with our HD video loop rundown test. Battery Eater works all subsystems including processor, graphics, memory and storage in its efforts to exhaust a battery as soon as possible. We have lots of legacy comparison data on this test, so we have a wider swath of numbers to compare to.
The HD video loop test, however, is new for us here, so we're still compiling reference numbers from a variety of different systems and notebook products.
The HD video loop test, however, is new for us here, so we're still compiling reference numbers from a variety of different systems and notebook products.
The Alienware 13 with its 2560X1440 OLED display, didn't knock the cover off the ball here, but for a gaming laptop to be hanging with some of these ultralights in the HD video loop test, is still very respectable. At nearly 5 hours of untethered up-time, playing back HD video, on a coast-to-coast flight for almost the entire trip is pretty much a reality. We should note that of course, in this case, the machine's Intel integrated HD 520 graphics engine is providing the video decode and rendering, while the discrete NVIDIA GeForce GTX 965M remains idle.
In the Battery Eater test, the Intel IGP is also used, so it's not indicative of gaming battery life per se, but something definitely more strenuous than just watching HD video. Here the AW 13 OLED holds up very well versus other gaming notebooks and premium laptops, offering about 2 hours and 45 minutes of up-time. If you're gaming on this machine, we'd suggest staying plugged in for best performance, especially with its GeForce GTX 965M graphics engine engaged.
In the Battery Eater test, the Intel IGP is also used, so it's not indicative of gaming battery life per se, but something definitely more strenuous than just watching HD video. Here the AW 13 OLED holds up very well versus other gaming notebooks and premium laptops, offering about 2 hours and 45 minutes of up-time. If you're gaming on this machine, we'd suggest staying plugged in for best performance, especially with its GeForce GTX 965M graphics engine engaged.
A Note On The Alienware 13's Acoustics:
With a discrete NVIDIA GPU and dual-core CPU that spools up to 3.1GHz, you would think the Alienware 13 OLED might have occasionally offensive emissions, but that's just not the case. Under the stresses and strains of our benchmark runs, we did hear its fans spin up, but it took a hefty workload from Cinebench or a game engine like Shadow of Mordor, to make the machine sing. Even then, the Alienware 13 OLED was tame. We observed GPU temps peaking at 72C and a full throttle graphics core speed of 1152MHz and a memory clock at 2505MHz, right at the full might of NVIDIA's specs for the GPU. The AW 13 was all about that boost, no throttle, thanks very much.In addition, though the under side of its chassis does tend to get warm under these loads, temperatures were relatively tepid with the only obvious hot spots generated from its rear exhaust ports. In general, Alienware's thermal solution with the AW 13 OLED is well-designed, very effective at managing temps and well-behaved.
