Maingear eX-L 15 Gaming Notebook Review
Game Tests & Battery Life
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Metro 2033 is your basic post-apocalyptic first person shooter game with a few rather unconventional twists. Unlike most FPS titles, there is no health meter to measure your level of ailment, but rather you’re left to deal with life, or lack there-of more akin to the real world with blood spatter on your visor and your heart rate and respiration level as indicators. The game is loosely based on a novel by Russian Author Dmitry Glukhovsky. Metro 2003 boasts some of the best 3D visuals on the PC platform currently including a DX11 rendering mode that makes use of advanced depth of field effects and character model tessellation for increased realism. We tested the game engine using the Metro 2033 benchmark tool. |
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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. |
Unlike Metro 2033, the somewhat dated Far Cry 2 benchmark isn't as hard on systems, and it was no match for the combination of an Intel quad-core Core i7 2720QM and Nvidia GeForce 485M found in the eX-L 15.
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Lost Planet 2 is a third person shooter developed by Capcom. It is the sequel to Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, and takes place ten years after the events of the first game. The plot begins with Mercenaries fighting against Jungle Pirates, while featuring major boss battles, extreme terrain, and the ability to pilot mechanized armor suits. We tested the game engine using the stand alone benchmark tool. |
With a top score in our Lost Planet 2 benchmark, the eX-L 15 not only walks away with our performance crown, it runs with it, having bested recently reviewed systems in every one of our performance evaluations.
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BatteryEater Pro tends to measure worst case scenarios, in that it doesn't really take into consideration power saving features, instead loading up the system until it dies out. Most high-end gaming systems fizzle out around the one-hour mark, but the eX-L 15 kept chugging along for 106 minutes. We ran the benchmark several times to rule out user error but the eX-L 15 consistently stayed up and longer than we expected. Further, if you're not exercising the GPU continually (though a light load) like our Battery Eater Pro test did, you'd likely see much better battery life for general purpose uses like web browsing and email.
