Testbed and Methods
I checked the performance of the ASUS A3500L notebook out in Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition with DirectX 9.0a. Before the tests I disabled power-saving and network services, the audio subsystem, antivirus software, and screensavers. The notebook was tested at the maximum and minimal screen brightness settings and at the maximum resolution of the LCD matrix (1024x768).
Our tests:
Performance benchmarks: synthetic (SiSoftware Sandra 2004, PCMark 2004), office and multimedia (Business Winstone 2004, Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004), games (3DMark 2001SE Pro, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament 2003);Battery life tests (Battery Eater Pro 2.30).I used two power modes in my tests. First, I selected the Always On power mode for the maximum performance and the shortest battery run-down time. Then, I switched to the Max Battery mode for the maximum battery run-down time.
Performance
The ASUS A3500L did well in synthetic SiSoftware Sandra 2004 and PCMark04 tests that are intended for benchmarking the performance of the entire system as well as of its subsystems. You may note that the results in the two power modes don?t differ much: the Mobile Celeron M doesn?t have Intel?s SpeedStep technology for dynamical optimization of the performance and power consumption of the processor.
The detailed results of this test follow below:
To check out the performance of the notebook in office and multimedia applications I used Business Winstone 2004 and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 tests that run scripts of the following real applications: Internet Explorer, Outlook, Word, Excel, Access, Project, Power Point, Front Page, WinZip, Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition (these are tested by Business Winstone 2004) and Windows Media Encoder, Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, NewTek LightWave 3D, Steinberg WaveLab, Dreamweaver MX, Director MX (tested by Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004).
The results follow:
So, the performance of the notebook in this test can be considered acceptable. When powered by its own battery, the notebook suffers a performance hit of about 10 percent. I constructed a diagram based on the numbers from these two tests:
