Dell Latitude E6500 Owner's Lounge

Don't have a scale to confirm an accurate weight. But with WUXGA, 7200RPM 160GB, P8400, Quadro 160M, I can get a little under 2 hours at a brightness lower than 50% with my normal usage. I haven't timed it, but with some light usage, brightness down nearly all the way (which was still quite usable I might add), and on the Vista Power Saver mode I estimate I got around 2 and a half hours the other day.

I imagine this could be another 15 to 30 minutes since I usually plug in at around 12% left. I haven't run it to fully dead yet.

 

The weight is this thread.

John

 

Yeah, I saw that but I was hoping someone else could confirm that weight. Over a pound difference between the two models seems rather a stark contrast given that the exterior dimensions are pretty similar.

 

Would you normally run it at only 50% brightness? Based on your numbers and John Ratsey's, the E6500 is only getting half the battery life of the E6400. John, does this sound right? I would expect the slightly larger screen to only affect battery life by around 10% or less. I wonder if this is a dedicated vs. integrated graphics issue.

 

In this case, it might rather be a WUXGA vs. WXGA+ display issue. The folks at Notebookcheck have reviewed an E6500 with Nvidia graphics, a Seagate Momentus 7200.2 HD and the WXGA+ display, measuring an absolute minimum consumption of 10.4 watts. Sadly, they haven't translated their review to English yet.

 

At least on my E6400, 50% brightness is plenty bright. As bright as other CCFL screens at full.

Greg

 

Yes, the display brightness will make more difference to the power than the actual screen size. I observed 4W power difference between minimum and maximum brightness on my E6400. The area of a 15.4" display is almost 20% more than for a 14.1" display, but backlight power is only part of the total power drain. A brightness setting of 2 steps above minimum is quite usable on my E6400.

Other factors affecting overall battery run time are (i) CPU power drain (particularly when running under light usage); GPU power drain; (iii) HDD power drain; and (iv) what is connected to the USB ports and whether other components such as wireless and Bluetooth are on or off.

I would hope that an E6500 with 6 cell battery and Intel GPU can reach 4 hours under light load with dim backlight and no wireless, and may be squeezed past 5 hours with the maximum power saving features enabled. The 15.4" Samsung R510 with Intel graphics can get to 4 1/2 hours.

John