Battery life & temperature

How good is the battery life?

I tested the battery life using PCMark 10's new Modern Office and Gaming battery life benchmarks. All the notebooks were set to 100 per cent display brightness and had Wi-Fi enabled. The keyboard backlight was disabled. 

Battery life on the Blade 15 is decent for this class of laptop, thanks to the 80Wh battery. However, there's still distance to cover before it can really be considered class-leading, seeing as how the Acer and Gigabyte laptops both lasted longer. 

When it comes to our portability index, which takes into account factors such as chassis dimensions, weight, and battery life, the Blade 15 performed quite respectably. It lost out to the Acer and Gigabyte laptops, but it's still far better than something like the Lenovo Legion Y740. To sum things up in a few words – it's not amazing, but it'll do. 

Is the cooling performance good?

Unlike the other laptops reviewed here, the Blade 15 uses vapour chamber cooling technology instead of conventional heat pipes. This covers both the CPU and GPU, and the vacuum-sealed vaporised liquid helps dissipate heat from other components as well.

One thing to note is that surface temperatures on the Blade 15 are noticeably higher than that on the competing notebooks here. I measured the temperatures after 40 loops of 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme, which gives the notebook plenty of time to work up a sweat. 

That said, while the Blade 15 can get quite toasty, I wouldn't worry too much about it. It gets warm but never uncomfortably hot, and more importantly, the WASD key cluster doesn't heat up excessively.