Performance

We checked out the performance of the ASUS M6B00N and the Acer TravelMate 803 LCi under control of Microsoft Windows XP Professional with DirectX 9.0a installed. Before the tests, we disabled power-saving and network services, the audio subsystems, antivirus software, and screensavers. We benchmarked the computers at the maximum and minimal screen brightness and at the maximum screen resolution.

Our tests:

1. Performance benchmarks: synthetic (SiSoftware Sandra 2004, PCMark 2004), office and multimedia (Business Winstone 2004, Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004), games (3DMark 2003 3.40, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament 2003);
2. Battery life tests (Battery Eater Pro 2.22).

We also used two power modes in our 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.

The ASUS M6B00N and the Acer TravelMate 803 LCi are positioned as office machines, so the results of Business Winstone 2004 and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 will be most important for determining their suitability to the proposed job.

We’ve got nice results. When powered by the accumulator battery, the notebooks both reduce their performance in double, as the system automatically switches into the resources saving mode. The ASUS M6B00N has about 6% better score in Business Winstone 2004 than the Acer TravelMate 803 LCi and about 13% better in Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004. For those of you how prefer thinking visually, here are a couple of diagrams:

The CPU performance results as reported by SiSoftware Sandra 2004 and PCMark 2004 are practically the same with both computers. Well, they do use the same Pentium M 1.6GHz processor model! The same goes for the memory performance.

The disk subsystem of the ASUS M6B00N is 13-19% faster than that of the Acer TravelMate 803 LCi – Hitachi’s drive of the first notebook has a larger cache buffer. The graphics performance as reported by PCMark 2004 is quite naturally higher with the ASUS M6B00N, as it uses a faster graphics processor (RADEON Mobility 9600 against RADEON Mobility 9000 in the TravelMate 803LCi). You can see the details of the tests below:

The notebooks use discrete graphics controllers, so it is interesting to benchmark them in games. As you see in the table below, 3DMark 2003 3.40 prefers the ASUS notebook with its RADEON Mobility 9600 and 64MB of dedicated graphics memory. The performance difference makes about 61%.

Note also that the RADEON Mobility 9000 controller of the Acer TravelMate 803 LCi does not support version 2.0 pixel shaders and cannot pass Game Test 4. And one more point: the graphics-related parameters of the notebooks (like fill rate, vertex or pixel shader performance) don’t change as we switch from the wall outlet to the notebook’s own accumulator battery.