Performance

I tested the Acer TravelMate 803LCi and 6003LCi notebooks with their preinstalled operating systems – Windows XP Professional and Windows XP Home Edition, respectively. After all, the owner of each of these notebooks is likely to use the preinstalled OS, I guess. The DirectX 9.0a API was installed on both notebooks, too. I disabled network services, audio subsystems, power-saving services, antivirus software, screensavers and error messages before the tests. The computers were tested at the maximum and minimal screen brightness settings and at the maximum resolution of the LCD matrix.

Our tests:

1. 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);
2. Battery life tests (Battery Eater Pro 2.23).

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.

The results of the synthetic tests SiSoftware Sandra 2004 and PCMark 2004 are presented below:

The notebooks both deliver a good performance. Note also that they both drop their speeds almost in half when powered from their internal batteries. As shown in the table above, the results of Sandra’s CPU Arithmetic and Multimedia Benchmarks are almost the same with both notebooks as they use the same central processors (Intel Pentium M 1.6GHz). The memory performance is, however, different: the TravelMate 803LCi is 7-10% faster than the 6003LCi in Sandra 2004 as well as in PCMark 2004. This is probably due to the 6003LCi model’s using shared memory architecture, while the 803LCi features 64 megabytes of dedicated graphics memory. The disc subsystems of the two notebooks also differ by about 10%: the 803LCi model has a 60GB Hitachi drive with an 8MB buffer, whereas the 6003LCi is equipped with a 40GB drive with a 2MB buffer. As might have been expected, the graphics subsystem of the TravelMate 803LCi (RADEON Mobility 9000 with 64MB of graphics memory) is reported to be 23% faster than the integrated graphics subsystem of the 6003LCi in PCMark 2004.

Next, I checked out the performance of the two notebooks in Business Winstone 2004 and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 tests which ran scripts of various real-life applications and produced the following results:

As you see, the TravelMate 803LCi is about 9% faster than the 6003LCi in Business Winstone 2004, and about 5% faster in Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004. This difference in the results is due to the difference in the configurations of the two notebooks (chipsets, graphics subsystems, hard disk drives). Here are a couple of diagrams for those of you who think visually: