Power consumption and battery life are very closely tied – try taking a 3-cell battery and connecting it to this system and you are going to see a system go into emergency shut down procedures very quickly. 

 

For our raw power consumption tests I plugged the notebook in with the AC power cord supplied when the battery was fully charged.  Comparing the m9750 to the Dell M1710 shows the inter-planetary system using surprisingly less power at idle than the intra-planetary system.  (sorry…). At load though, the Alienware is pulling more wattage at the wall – actually higher than the expected maximum output of the power brick that was 180 watts. 

This is still WELL below even the most model of gaming-based desktop systems though thanks to the mobility optimized components.

 

The battery life of the Alienware m9750 was a surprise – it actually lasted longer than I had originally expected.  Doing just simple web browsing with the wireless connection, we were able to get about 98 minutes of work time in before the system shut itself down.  While watching a DVD, the battery life was cut to under 80 minutes.

As you might have guessed, gaming on the batter would indeed be a futile task – don’t both asking how long it would run for.  I am guessing that with some titles the load times might take longer.  Gamers will require power access!

The m9750 is built upon the latest Intel chipset platform, code-named Santa Rosa. That means it has a Merom processor (covered above) CPU, Draft-N wireless, and an 800MHz front side bus. Out of all these, the only spec that is really of any interest is the N wireless, as it’s shown to be significantly faster than 802.11g. The front side bus can also dynamically down-clock itself to save battery life, but battery life is not something to be concerned with on a notebook with this much power since it will be terrible regardless of what the FSB is doing.