So, the performance of the two notebooks in CPU Arithmetic and Multimedia benchmarks is roughly the same. It is normal since they use identical CPUs. The HP Compaq uses DDR2 SDRAM clocked at 400MHz against DDR333 SDRAM of the Sony VAIO, and the performance difference between these two memory subsystems is estimated to be about 5% (DDR2 SDRAM has a higher bandwidth). The HP Compaq employs a faster hard drive, so it is 15-16% ahead of the Sony VAIO in the file system performance, too.

PCMark 2004 says the graphics performance of the HP Compaq is 36% faster than that of the Sony VAIO due to the difference in the GPU clock rates (398MHz against 301MHz) and in the graphics memory amount (64MB against 32MB+96MB (Shared)).

Business Winstone 2004 and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 are important tests since every notebook is expected to run office and multimedia applications at a high speed. These tests run scripts of popular real-life applications, several at a time. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get any results from the HP Compaq in these tests: they just wouldn’t run on it. The results of the Sony VAIO are listed below:

These are good results, although not excellent. The data from the table is presented as a diagram below:

The results of the notebooks in graphics performance tests are quite understandable. The Sony VAIO uses an NVIDIA GeForce Go 6200 controller that can use a dynamically allocated portion of the system RAM in addition to the dedicated 32 megabytes of graphics memory. The HP Compaq sports the ATI Mobility Radeon X600 with 64 megabytes of dedicated memory and this variant proves to be faster in practice.

Both notebooks perform well enough in 3DMark 2003 3.40 as you can see by the numbers in the following table:

The HP Compaq is about 27% faster than the Sony VAIO irrespective of the power source. Note that the performance in Fill Rate, Vertex Shader and Pixel Shader subtests remains almost the same irrespective of the power source. We also tested the notebooks in 3DMark 2005 for a thorough analysis of the graphics performance of the two computers:

The HP Compaq is about 19% faster here, too. There’s a very small difference as the power source changes ?the speed goes down by 3-4% only.