Best desktop replacement? 18" screen and long battery life.

dictum9

Distinguished
Aug 13, 2008
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18,570
I currently have Dell L702x but want something with better battery life, 18" versus 17" screen, bigger hard drive size (have 750GB now), solid state + conventional hard drive.

I am inclined to think about an Alienware version but wanted to get some other opinions. Will even consider 4K but should be OK with 1080.

I want to get a docking station and hook it up to a Dell U2713HM monitor which is at 2560x1440. So it's important the video card should drive it.

I want something a little newer than Dell L702x, which is nice, but
 

zionosis

Honorable
Oct 22, 2013
4
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10,510
Since it's a desktop replacement you could just pull the battery out and leave the power cord in. As far as taking it somewhere, sure you would use the battery then.

I doubt large laptops with large screens like 17 and 18 inch as well as powerful CPU's and good mobile GPU's etc have good battery life.

The best battery life comes from those netbook things. Some use less than 10w on average.

A high powered laptop (desktop replacement) would use at least on average about 40w+.

Because of lithium battery limitation you will not get good battery time on high powered laptops, sure the laptop is larger so it can pack in maybe 50% more battery cells into the battery, but the power draw is far higher than 50% more than a power efficient laptop.


Everything is always a compromise.

Like the ASUS G750JZ, It has a 17'' screen and is powerful.

That laptops CPU has a TDP only 2w more than your one, but it is significantly more powerful. Roughly 45% more powerful.

Also being a gaming laptop it's very graphically capable.

Of course comes with a bit of a price tag.



Most of these types of laptop do not really push the specs to the front of the battery life though as it isn't a good selling point. But even if it doesn't you can figure it out by seeing the battery and looking into it's CPU TDP and other things like graphics card etc and come up with an average.

Like that doesn't list it's life.

But with an 89 watt hour battery you can figure it out.
It has a 230w charger, most laptops chargers are a little over double the laptops usage, this enables it to charge the battery while running the laptop off power from the brick at the same time.

Don't expect any more than 2 hours on the laptop here, unless you have it on power saver mode and are doing very basic things like general internet search etc.