Dell XPS M1730 Mobile Gaming Notebook
Battery Performance
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Rounding out our testing, we ran MobileMark 2007 to assess the notebook's overall battery life while running a series of applications through a testing script.
We are using the standard benchmark settings from Bapco, along with a few other minor system tweaks. The screensaver was disabled and the volume was set at approximately 20%.
MobileMark 2007 utilizes the following applications
* Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0
* Adobe Illustrator CS2
* Adobe Photoshop CS2
* Apple QuickTime 7.1
* Intervideo WinDVD 8
* Macromedia Flash 8
* Microsoft Office 2003 Pro
* Microsoft Project 2003
* Winzip 10.0
The Dell XPS M1730 provided a bit over an hour and a quarter worth of battery life. While battery performance was poor for an average laptop, the M1730 gave a relatively unnoteworthy performance for a desktop replacement laptop as well. While we weren't pleasantly surprised, we aren't particularly disappointed with the M1730's battery life either. With a Core 2 Extreme processor, dual video cards and dual hard drives, battery life is what we expected. A gaming laptop like the XPS isn't really meant for long term untethered use. Most people in the market for a high performance gaming laptop want it for occasional portability and the ability to easily move their rig from place to place without worrying about a whole bunch of wires. For that purpose, the XPS M1730 will do just fine.
Note that the battery performance in this test pertains to light-weight productivity work, such as web surfing, word processing and checking your email. Battery performance while gaming is likely to be significantly worse. Once again, that is to be excepted and is on par with other gaming laptops of this caliber. Besides, you can't get in 'the zone' with your favorite game while riding on the bus anyway.
Note that the battery performance in this test pertains to light-weight productivity work, such as web surfing, word processing and checking your email. Battery performance while gaming is likely to be significantly worse. Once again, that is to be excepted and is on par with other gaming laptops of this caliber. Besides, you can't get in 'the zone' with your favorite game while riding on the bus anyway.
