A few questions about xps 15 l502x

I am gonna buy this laptop amd have a few questions about it
1. How much battery life can you get out of a 6 cell battery. I currently have the sxps16 and don't like the bulging 9 cell, and I don't want to have to get one for the XPS, is six cell enough for 3-4 hrs of web browsing
2. How good is the Gt540m GPU, how well can it play most contemporary games?

 

Medium to high details plays most games if not all. From what i can see the 6 cell last 4-5 hours and 9 cell last about 6-8

 

The GT540M is basically just a slightly higher clocked version of the 525M. The 2GB of memory is also irrelevant as the 128-bit GT 540M will not even be able to access all 2GB. Plus, most of the time you can overclock the 525M to 540M speeds.

I say save your money for the B+RGLED 1080p display (especially if you're on a budget). The 1920x1080 display is the most important upgrade, and it's what makes the Dell XPS 15 worth it. Don't stick with the 1366x768 screen. It's really difficult to find the exact parts and upgrade it later, whereas the RAM is really easy to upgrade, the CPU is easy to find the part for, and the GPU can be overclocked.

Also, $70-off coupon in case you need it to afford the 1080p:
Your Coupon Code

 

Yeah i am definitely gonna go with the 1080p B+RGLED screen. That was one of my main attractions towards this laptop.
@badboys93 can you confirm those many hours of battery life, they seem to good to be true. Are you speculating or are you telling from experience. I am hoping for atleast 4 hrs of battery life while web browsing but according to laptopmag it only gives 4 hrs on the 9 cell battery, but the NBR review of the l501x says it gets 4 hrs on 6 cell. I am really confused and am looking for true numbers from owners.

 

I can confirm 5-6 hrs or so, while browsing with the 9 cell as long as you switch Windows 7 to power saver mode. The 525M is good enough, the 540M is not buying you anything. Of course I would prefer the 555M but that is not an option,

 

So if one didn't want to oc the gpu of the 525, you could get the 540 and basically have a more a less oced 525 but the extra memory serves no purpose? I don't completely understand, could you explain a bit more? I don know what 128 bit means in this regards and how would one take full advantage of the extra memory?

 

The 128-bit is the bus width. It's how many bits of data can get transfered from the GPU to and from the GPU RAM in one transaction. The bus width has no effect on how much memory the GPU can address.

The GPU RAM serves 2 functions. One is a frame buffer basically it's where the actually drawing of the pixels takes place prior to sending to the screen. The other is to preload texture graphics in there so that scenes can be rendered quickly. I don't know of any games that use more than 1GB of video ram effectively. Besides, the RAM on the 525M is DDR3 which is the same kind of RAM as the main RAM in the L502X so the only difference would be the speed from the internal 2GB or through the PciEx x16 bugs if you had tons of textures you need to load from main memory (basically negligible).