m15x has awesome battery life.

I got the smart bay battery for my m15x and I was able to play Age of Conan for over 2 hours before I got a battery low message. This was not in stealth mode, and the screen brightness down, but not all the way, wireless and bluetooth were both still on as well.
2 hours doesn't seem like a lot but for playing a game on a laptop it is, my old laptop could barely get 2 hours just word processing for school. I would imagine the m15x could get 5-6 hours word processing/internet browsing.
Overall once my speakers gets fixed I will be very happy with my purchase.

 

yer ive said this from the start the smart bay battery is a must have item for the m15x and really the main reason u should get the laptop... its battery performance is one of a kind.. the next in line is early half as long battery in the np5973 17sager.

most m15x owners seem to not have the smart bay battery which i find very strange.. GET A DESKTOP!

 

Agreed heathkidd, the battery life is the main reason I bought the m15x, I was sick of being forced to plug in my laptop at school, if I didn't have a plug near by it wouldn't even last an entire class. All the high end parts I put in were all just the icing on the cake.

 

I didn't get the smart bay battery option. But I am starting to wish i did. My new job is going to have me moving around more often then i thought. So that smart bay battery is looking more and ore enticing.

Hopefully i can still order it after the fact.

 

I'm thinking about getting it too, it really seems handy. Can anyone confirm if we can still order it after we recieve our laptops?

 

Yes, you can order it. Just call tech support and they will order it for you. I did this for a smartbay battery and also for the smartbay hd loader so that I could slap an extra hd into it that I had lying around.

 

man i ordered mine last week and still haven't gotten any updates on its status...

the rep i ordered from said they would ship it out last friday...it's now thursday and still no word. gotta give them a call later. as awesome as this laptop is...it's such a pain having to deal with their tech support and customer service...

 

Yes, and it is much, much cheaper. 78 dollars.

 

Awesome! Thanks for letting me know.

 

Sweet thx for the info. Time to email Roswell and order one (if i can order from there that is).

 

Yes, you can order from the Roswell Crew.

 

I ordered mine from Roswell like a month after I got my system(they were on backorder when I bought my system and they didn't have them in stock till a month after). I ordered it on a monday got it on Friday and it cost me $78 including shipping which was cheaper than the $100 it would have cost me to order it with my system. Great purchase I've been on my system since 8:00(eastern) this morning i'm still running

 

Same here Taco. It's great not having to worry about battery running out.

 

Cool, with regards to the HDD loader does that mean u can put a normal desktop hdd into the smart bay drive? i take it needs to be sata?

And ye i think i'll order a smart bay battery after i get my m15x if i get one, should be really useful

 

yes, it needs to be SATA, and 2.5inch formfactor.

 

desktop hdds are alot bigger. if you plan on swapping just make sure you buy a sata laptop hard drive

 

I think I'll get one of these in the next month or two. Not really an issue with battery now but the 6 cell the m15x came with is really small. 2~2.5 hours at best just sitting idle on power saver using the dedicated GPU, non stealth.

 

Hey there Jordan.. Nice to see you're enjoying the awesome-ness of the m15x and it's battery !!
Was wondering if you could post in the Worldwide Forum Survey for the m15x cause the more numbers there are, the more accurate all the graphs will be..
Thanx

 

if your not going to maximize the battery life in a notebook of this price braket your better off getting 3 Desktops that perform the same thats why i'm so suprized people didn't get the smart bay battery ... i guess it was in very short suply earlier in the year and delayed orders even more.

im tempted to get even 2 or 3 smart bay battery.

 

Battery life is good when the power went out. You can be in a game and Poof power is out and it could be out for a few hours or it could be out a few days. A desktop not going to do much at this time unless you have a generator.

If it a game online your out of luck. Best to have two games one online and one off line.

 

When you play on battery your GPU gets downclocked and the gaming performance is really poor. Someone that wants to play, should play when plugged in.

So, I could only agree that the smartbay would be EXTREMELY useful if you have to work for long periods of times on the laptop (like word processing, excel, database, etc etc...). Wanting to game on the M15x on batteries is really pointless.

More... Most of the people bought the M15x to fill in the gaps of modern life. I'm always on the move, living away from home, not knowing where I will be next. I have to work to earn money to, for example, buy my own M15x (maybe that's why I care about all the problems it has and I don't come here saying "Does it wobble? What's the problem if you can play on it... What's the problem if it burns if you can play on it?"), and therefore I need the laptop for more things rather than playing. Obviously buying a desktop and carrying it around is not a solution.

It's great that you can have so many option regarding batteries on the M15x, but... how useful is it? It's great to have the "biggest" one... but what's the point on having 5 hours of battery? It's great... but what can it be useful for? Really?

I agree the Smartbay is a good idea. It gives the laptop more adaptability. I will probably be getting one, but for putting another HDD. I rarely use the battery on my laptop. Most of the times it's not even there. At work or at home, I always plug it in.

 

If you put it on High Performance mode it doesn't downclock anything on battery, and I didn't notice much of a performance hit when I set it to balanced either, maybe 5-10 fps, but it was still very playable, I was playing age of conan which is pretty resource intensive and I got over 30 fps on balanced and over 40 on high performance.

So you can play games on battery, it only lasts about 2 hours, but I wouldn't game for much more than that on a laptop anyways, but what it does mean is I could play a game without plugging in at lunch time at school if I want to, or even in class

I got my m15x for school, and there isn't always a plug nearby in every classroom, or at lunch, so the battery was the major selling point for me. Also I am going for a bachelors in computing science and focusing on game development so the high end components help with that as well.

 

Jordon, I'm sorry to dissagree, but on batteries both your GPU and CPU will downclock drastically. Unless yours is different (which I'm sure it's not). Try and download Rivatuner and RMClock. You'll see what I am talking about...

 

Why not do the 3dMark 06 on it.

One thing I can add The M17X has a 2 Hour battery life just reading the fourms and listing to music and downloading updates for a game. Not sure in games. But this laptop has a better setup then my Pro-Star laptop P4 3.4ghz and Acer centerno duo 1.6ghz 15 Inch.

 

I didn't check it with riva tuner, but there was no performance drop on battery in high performance mode, I will check it when I get it back, but even if it does, that fact is you CAN play games on battery.

 

theres not many games you can play with the m15x on battery. you might be able to play a couple of source games. i tried cod 4 and it wont work too well.

 

There is a difference jordan. You're probably just not seeing it because the FPS is too high to start with, so that even when the computer's performance is cut in half you still don't see a difference (i.e. 120 FPS and 60 FPS will look identical because the screen's refresh rate is 60 FPS)

And yes, you can definitely play games on battery. Just be willing to cut down a couple options or accept a lower FPS.

 

Yes, if I'm playing Chuckie Egg I'm sure I won't notice any drop in performance.
It all depends on what you are playing. I challenge you to try and play CoD4, crysis, stalker, etc... on Battery.

 

crysis wont run on battery.

for cod 4 i lowered the resolution and changed some of the settings to med/low to have it run ok.

basically if you are going to try playing on battery you just have to try playing in stealth mode. its basically the same thing.

 

you could go all low and possibly eek out something in the 20+ fps range, if you really needed to

 

Just wanted to let people know that if you order the smart bay battery in the USA it will be 78-79 dollars, however if you ask them about the alienware discount (assuming you are a previous customer) it drops it down to around 71 dollars.

Now to fix my speaker buzz...

 

try to press down on your speaker to see if it fixes it. if it does then you need to send it in.

 

mine buzzes, and when i press the plastic over the speaker, it stops... it's balls to have to send in the laptop for such an easy fix...

 

Yeah, I pressed down on it, but as I'm heading out of the country soon I'll have to wait till I get back to send it in...wish there was an easy fix to permanently push down on it.

 

I love my AW m15x battery life, I only have the normal battery & on stealth mode it lasts longer than my crappy Dell laptop which only has an Intel Card & 1.8ghz

 

the smart bay feature i THE reason iam getting the m15x. i am willing to gamble to be able to get 6 hour of just web browsisng!

 

Ordered the damn smart bay battery back on the 14th. Called for an update today and "sorry sir, we are out of stock." We'll see if I can get it in time. I specifically asked if I would receive it before the beginning of August and it was a "yeah, that won't be a problem." Grrr...

 

I ordered mine (smart bay battery and 200GB HD) on July 17 and I got it 2 days ago (Tuesday 22nd)

 

Just ordered a smartbay battery yesterday...she said it would be around 2 weeks

 

That's ridiculous, I hate it when companies pull **** like that.