Testbed and Methods
We performed our tests in the OS preinstalled on both notebooks, namely in Microsoft Windows XP Professional with DirectX 9.0c installed. Before the tests we disabled power-saving and network services, the audio subsystem, antivirus software, and screensavers. The notebooks were tested at the maximum screen brightness setting and at the maximum resolution of the LCD matrix.
We used two power modes in the tests. First, we selected the Always On power mode for the maximum performance and the shortest battery run-down time. Then, we switched to the Max Battery mode for the maximum battery run-down time.
Our tests:
Performance benchmarks: synthetic (SiSoftware Sandra 2005, PCMark 2004), office and multimedia (Business Winstone 2004, Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004), games (3DMark 2003 3.40, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament 2003);Battery life tests (Battery Eater Pro 2.50).Performance
First we would like to present the results of office and multimedia tests since a notebook is expected to provide enough performance in such applications in the first place. The Business Winstone test runs scripts of the following real applications, several scripts at a time: Internet Explorer, Outlook, Word, Excel, Access, Project, PowerPoint, FrontPage, WinZip, and Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition.
The Multimedia Content Creation Winstone tests determines the performance of a computer in the following multimedia applications: Windows Media Encoder, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, NewTek LightWave 3D, Steinberg WaveLab, Dreamweaver MX, and Director MX.
The results of these two tests are tabled below:
The performance is overall high. Note also that the W2P00VB is 12% and 16% ahead of the W1J00Ga in Business Winstone and Multimedia Winstone, respectively. The difference is even higher when the notebooks work on their batteries ?20% and 24%. This gap in performance comes as the W2P00VB uses a new chipset, a CPU with a higher clock rate (2.13GHz against 2.0GHz), and a faster FSB (533MHz against 400MHz). We constructed diagrams for a comparative analysis of the results of the tests:
