Alienware Sentia m3450 14-inch Notebook

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Anthony Fiti
Kurtis
Alienware
Dec. 5, 2006

Specifications

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Testing: Battery Life

Battery life was tested in three situations - minimal work (Word, internet via 802.11G wireless, etc), watching a DVD with the wireless turned off, and under full load.

Light Usage: 114 minutes
DVD (wireless off): 99 minutes
Full Load (both cores): 77 minutes

The DVD playback was disappointing - 99 minutes isn't enough for most movies, let alone more than one movie. You might be able to stretch out the battery more by turning the LCD brightness down, but I wouldn't expect that to dramatically increase battery life. The full load was really short - only 77 minutes. Nowadays with laptops we expect at least two hours or so while under heavy use, and three under light use. This laptop didn't even reach 2 hours under light usage.

The important thing I want to make note of is that this laptop does have a 7200RPM HD, which while doing wonders for performance, will also suck battery more than a 5400RPM HD (which are found in most laptops). It's a tradeoff - this laptop is available with a larger HD at 5400RPM so you might see better battery life if you get the larger, slower (and less power hungry) HD.

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Page 8 of 9

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: First Looks
Page 3: Taking a Closer Look
Page 4: Bundled Software
Page 5: Testing: Hardware & Software
Page 6: Testing: Temperature
Page 7: Testing: Performance
Page 8: Testing: Battery Life
Page 9: Conclusion

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4 User Comments

1 - Posted by EmoMakesMeCry on December 6, 2006 - 1:43 am

pretty sweet notebook. the only problem i have with the sentia is it's keyboard. it just looks...i dunno...ugly? i can't put my finger on it.

anyways, any idea if y'all will be getting a thinkpad x60 for review? that'd be a pretty cool comparison. :)

2 - Posted by Nick on December 6, 2006 - 12:30 pm

No way would i get a notebook that shuts off under full load due to thermal throttling. That just screams poor design. Im really surprised such a problem could make it through testing unnoticed. They make test chambers specifically for rooting out these types of failures and it would surprise me greatly if alienware didnt employ them during design, testing and production.

3 - Posted by Kurtis on December 6, 2006 - 4:47 pm

I was quite surprised myself... Oddly enough, it doesn't crash under loops of 3DMark, which is what they use for stability testing. But it does crash under the heavy CPU load of Orthos (and HL2, coincidentally).

4 - Posted by Anthony on December 6, 2006 - 4:50 pm

Indeed, and its not like my room is that hot (76-78F). But two laptops later I could provoke both into shutting down while running Orthos.

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