Product Listing

Dell Alienware M11x - Honey I Shrunk the Gaming Notebook!

By Aloysius Low - 10 May 2010
Launch SRP: S$1999

Battery Life and Portability Index

Battery Life and Portability Index

The Dell Alienware M11x has a non-removable 8-cell 64Wh battery and comes with a built-in battery indicator to show how much of a charge it has left at the bottom of the unit.

We've had our doubts ourselves when it came to the battery performance of the Dell Alienware M11x despite it using an Intel CULV processor. One of our main concerns was the fact that the discrete graphics would use too much power that the Intel CULV processor wouldn't matter. Another concern was that because the battery isn't removable, having a short battery life would mean this laptop isn't as portable as it could be and totally impractical. Our guesses turned out to be wrong though, as you will see from our test graphs below.

Battery Life

With five and a half hours (331 minutes) with the discrete graphics turned off and close to 4 hours (226 minutes) when using discrete graphics, the Dell Alienware M11x is pretty much the portable gaming notebook you are looking for. All thanks to its 8-cell battery, the M11x has plenty of staying power that should be useful for gaming while unplugged. While it is heavy for an 11-inch machine at 2kg, we'll see how if its worthwhile as we check how it fares in our Portability Index below.

On the Power Efficiency charts, it seems that the M11x is doing pretty well in this department, with pretty low figures (11.59W) when running on integrated graphi. However, when the discrete graphics is turned on, power consumption shoots up to 17.02W, which is way more than what the Acer unit is (13.92W) which also has its discrete graphics turned on. However bear in mind though, the discrete graphics of the M11x is much more powerful (as seen on our previous page), so it's only natural for the power draw to be higher.

Portability Index

Our favorite test - where we take the battery uptime and divide it by the product of the unit's weight and volume - makes a return as usual. The higher the ratio, the more portable the unit is and we'll see if the impressive battery life translates to a portable unit given the chunkiness of the notebook. Surprisingly, despite our earlier concerns, the Alienware M11x manages to rank pretty well  - even when taking into consideration other lighter and slimmer Intel CULV processor equipped notebooks. It's an outcome that we're quite impressed with, especially given the five and a half hours battery life of the M11x.


 

Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
9.0
  • Design 8.5
  • Features 9
  • Performance 9.5
  • Value 9
  • Mobility 9
The Good
Excellent performance
Good battery life
The Bad
Chunky for a 11-inch notebook
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.