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TopNax |
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As for comparisons with the GT 335M, the GT 420M gets one tie (BFBC2), several titles where it loses by around 10%, a massive 30% deficit in Call of Pripyat, and then to cap it all off there's a 35% lead in StarCraft II. It's possible the 260.89 driver is the culprit with SC2 (and perhaps some of the other titles as well), as the N82Jv was tested with the now-outdated 258.96 driver, but the general consensus of gaming results is that GT 420M is roughly 10% slower than GT 335M at low settings (give or take).
The move to our medium detail settings drops performance a bit, but nearly all of the tested games stay above 30FPS at 768p. Only Mafia 2 (27.5FPS) and Metro 2033 (22.9FPS) fail to reach playable levels. Of course, at 1080p more than half of the tested games fall under 30FPS (including Mafia 2 and Metro 2033, naturally). L4D2 is the least demanding game in our test suite, and it's joined by STALKER (barely) and StarCraft II. That last is an important win, as SC2 looks pretty awful at low settings but improves dramatically when you switch to medium, so it's good to see it stay above 30FPS. |
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Looking at the N82Jv comparison once more, things get a bit more interesting. We now have two ties, a ~10% lead by the 335M in two other titles, and a still-large 27% lead in STALKER; however, L4D2 now favors the 420M by nearly 40% and the SC2 lead drops to 25%. Looking at the low and medium detail results as a whole, if "mainstream gaming" means 768p low to medium quality, the XPS L501x (and GT 420M) will do the trick. However, if you want medium to high quality at higher resolutions, you'll need something with a bit more potency.
Wrapping up the gaming and graphics charts, we've got the high quality 900p comparisons and 3DMark—both comparisons equally "useful". Three of the games (DiRT 2, L4D2, and Mass Effect 2) come close to the 30FPS mark but fall just short. All of the remaining titles are far below the playable mark, with dips into the teens and even single digits. The 420M can get a few of the test games to break 30FPS at 768p and high detail settings, but it's simply inadequate for 1080p—or even 900p—gaming with the most recent releases. 335M maintains a slight lead at high settings, but it's mostly academic as neither GPU is really able to handle our high settings. As for 3DMark, take the results for what they're worth. We've stopped including the charts for 03 and 05, since they're quite outdated, but if you just want the numbers the L501x got 15552 in 03 and 12275 in 05 (about 11% lower than the N82Jv in 03 but just 2% slower in 05). 06 gives the 335M a 21% lead, which is a bit more than our gaming suite, and 7% in Vantage (at the awful-looking Entry Level setting). Vantage also scored 3364 at the "Performance" (1680x1050) defaults. |
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Dell XPS L501x Battery Life: Good but the 9-Cell Would Be Better
The default battery in the L501x is a 6-cell 56Wh unit, which is more than the paltry 48Wh 6-cell batteries in many laptops but not quite at the 63Wh level seen in others. The combination of Optimus Technology and a reasonable battery means we should see good battery life, but nothing record setting. That's pretty much what we get, with a few oddities.
The L501x comes out ahead of many of the 48Wh laptops in the idle, despite having a larger 15.6" LCD, so the slightly higher capacity battery balances things out. Internet battery life is a different story, dropping the L501x down below the N82Jv but still slightly ahead of the ID49C. As bad as that result may look in the chart, it's also still 16% higher than the Toshiba A660D with a 16.7% larger battery, so in that particular test the AMD P920 + HD 4250 matches the i5-460M + GT 420M on a relative basis. In contrast to the Internet result, the x264 playback puts the XPS back ahead of many of the 48Wh batteries. We had hoped for something a bit more impressive here, but the results aren't bad. It could be that the higher LCD resolution affects some tests negatively (i.e. in the Internet test, you would see more of the test web pages and thus Flash ads further down the page might increase CPU usage). [Update: I retested Internet battery life at 1366x768 and the result didn't change; for some reason the L501x does far worse in that test relative to the other laptops.] HWmonitor also shows the battery at 4% wear despite over 10 cycles, so you might get slightly improved results with a different battery. Ultimately, though, the simple solution to battery life concerns is to spend an extra $40 and get the 9-cell 92Wh battery if you want to run all (or at least most of the) day untethered. There's a compromise in weight with the 9-cell battery, though, and it juts out about an inch below the laptop. I prefer the form factor of the 6-cell battery, but it's always nice to have a choice. |
