Dell Latitude E6530 Review: Business Class Performance

Name: Dell Latitude E6530
Brand: Dell

by Ray Willington — Tuesday, August 21, 2012, 11:15 AM EDT

FarCry 2 and Metro 2033 Gaming Tests

DirectX Gaming Performance

FarCry 2

Like the original, FarCry 2 is one of the more visually impressive games to be released on the PC to date. Courtesy of the Dunia game engine developed by Ubisoft, FarCry 2's game-play is enhanced by advanced environment physics, destructible terrain, high resolution textures, complex shaders, realistic dynamic lighting, and motion-captured animations. We benchmarked the test systems in this article with the FarCry 2 benchmark tool using one of the built-in demo runs recorded in the "Ranch" map.

The somewhat dated FarCry 2 benchmark isn't as hard on current gen systems, but with this machine boasting only an integrated HD 4000 GPU, we figured it'd be a fair match. Even at the native 1600x900 resolution, we were able to maintain constant 23-28 frames per second. Crank the details down a bit and it's possible to remain at over 30FPS. Again, impressive with an integrated GPU.

Battery Life

Power Performance

BatteryEater Pro tends to measure worst case scenarios, in that it doesn't really take into consideration power saving features, instead working the system's hard drive, CPU and graphics moderately until it dies out. We kept our test machines with Wi-Fi on, and screen brightness hovering at 50% for the life of the test.

A 97Whr, 9-cell battery is included here, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that this is one of the longest lasting machines we've benchmarked to date. The slice-style battery pokes out of the rear a good bit, but that gains you several more hours of life compared to the more compact 4-cell and 6-cell options. As these tests typically go, our rundown test -- which does a great job of replicating tough usage in the real world -- managed to choke the life out of the battery more quickly than you might see in light usage. Though breaking a sweat here we only saw just under 4 hours of battery life, under simple web browsing and email light duty workload you'll likely double that uptime figure.