Comparative Performance - Battery Life
Long battery life is obviously not the main goal of the XPS M1710. However, we were still curious to see how it would compare to the other laptops. One of the interesting aspects is that because SpeedStep is always enabled even with overclocking, battery life isn't severely impacted by running the processor at higher performance settings. We limited our battery testing to best and worst case scenarios, in this case Bin-0 and Bin-5 overclock settings. While we've already explained that Bin-5 is generally not the best setting for optimal performance, we did run MobileMark 2005 Productivity at all of the various overclock settings and battery life was lower with Bin-5 than any of the others (despite the much lower performance score).
Somewhat surprisingly, the higher performance XPS M1710 does manage to offer longer battery life than the ABS Mayhem Z5. Even in the worst-case maximum overclock configuration the M1710 still outlasts the Mayhem. Of course, that's not saying much when compared with the battery life the ASUS A8JS offers, and if you don't need gaming performance and value mobility there are other laptops that can easily surpass any of the laptops tested here. The longer battery life can also be attributed to a larger battery capacity, as the M1710 comes with an 80 WHr battery in comparison to the 65 WHr battery of the Mayhem Z5.
You can see the test results for our simulated mobile gaming as well, but you'll have to take those with a grain of salt. We looped 3DMark06 continuously until the battery ran out and recorded how long the system was active. While that should provide the information we need, the one fly in the ointment is that when running on battery the GeForce Go 7950 GTX was always running at lower clock speeds. We thought this might be a driver problem at first, but after speaking with Dell we were informed that the battery cannot deliver enough power to run the GPU at maximum clock speed. In order to avoid causing problems with the battery, GPU performance is reduced in mobile mode. Various benchmarks indicate that the GPU is roughly one third as fast as normal when the power cord is unplugged.
Long battery life is obviously not the main goal of the XPS M1710. However, we were still curious to see how it would compare to the other laptops. One of the interesting aspects is that because SpeedStep is always enabled even with overclocking, battery life isn't severely impacted by running the processor at higher performance settings. We limited our battery testing to best and worst case scenarios, in this case Bin-0 and Bin-5 overclock settings. While we've already explained that Bin-5 is generally not the best setting for optimal performance, we did run MobileMark 2005 Productivity at all of the various overclock settings and battery life was lower with Bin-5 than any of the others (despite the much lower performance score).
Somewhat surprisingly, the higher performance XPS M1710 does manage to offer longer battery life than the ABS Mayhem Z5. Even in the worst-case maximum overclock configuration the M1710 still outlasts the Mayhem. Of course, that's not saying much when compared with the battery life the ASUS A8JS offers, and if you don't need gaming performance and value mobility there are other laptops that can easily surpass any of the laptops tested here. The longer battery life can also be attributed to a larger battery capacity, as the M1710 comes with an 80 WHr battery in comparison to the 65 WHr battery of the Mayhem Z5.
You can see the test results for our simulated mobile gaming as well, but you'll have to take those with a grain of salt. We looped 3DMark06 continuously until the battery ran out and recorded how long the system was active. While that should provide the information we need, the one fly in the ointment is that when running on battery the GeForce Go 7950 GTX was always running at lower clock speeds. We thought this might be a driver problem at first, but after speaking with Dell we were informed that the battery cannot deliver enough power to run the GPU at maximum clock speed. In order to avoid causing problems with the battery, GPU performance is reduced in mobile mode. Various benchmarks indicate that the GPU is roughly one third as fast as normal when the power cord is unplugged.
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Gary Key - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link
It is a typo on the chart. The numbers reflected are the total score, not the individual break out on FPS.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link
Fixed. SupCom is a generated score from the perftest map (with an edited benchmark script). Sorry about that.yacoub - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link
what?Article says:
"We weren't able to run our latest gaming benchmarks (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Supreme Commander) on all of the laptops, so performance results for those games won't be included here."
JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link
The XPS M1710 OC scaling charts included SupCom and STALKER results. Just not the other laptops (although I might be able to run the benchmarks on a couple laptops still).yacoub - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link
I gave up on waiting for laptops to reach reasonable prices. Ordered a nice c2d setup to replace my aging A64 rig and did it for under $425. CPU, RAM, and Mobo. My 7900GT is still enough for now, but when the 8800GTS 640MB hits $350 without rebates I'll probably scoop one of those up too. So still under $800 for a full system upgrade.And since I can remote in to my home machine from work and my work machine from home, I really have little need for a laptop, though I do have a company-provided laptop for travel if I really needed to use it. On that flash games (tower defense, etc) are enough to keep me entertained if I'm that desperate to sit in a hotel room(?!). Most likely an mp3 player or a book is all I need in-flight and I'll be out doing things (business or tourist related) when I'm traveling so uber high-end gaming laptops at exorbitant prices just don't really have a use for me, or I'd imagine for most folks.
Ender17 - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link
The graphs would be a lot easier to read if they were labeled with the actual CPU speed instead of Bin 1, Bin 2...redbone75 - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link
Agreed. Just as easy to put 2.33 - 3.16 as it is to do Bin-0 - Bin-5. Actually, you save a character :)JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link
Given that the clock speeds are more of a request than an actual result, I didn't want to use those. I couldn't actually see if throttling was occurring during the game benchmarks, but the scores seem to indicate that the CPU was throttling at the Bin-4 and Bin-5 results on some games.The names I used came from discussions with Dell, where they referred to the clock speeds as "Bin + 3", but I used a plus sign instead. Given that the scores are all pretty close on many benchmarks, I didn't think too much about it.
Zsuu - Saturday, February 21, 2015 - link
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