Performance

I tested the two notebooks from ASUS with their preinstalled operating system – Microsoft Windows XP Professional with DirectX 9.0a. 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 (1280x800 for the A4B00L and 1680x1050 for the A4S00G).

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.

Our tests:

1. Performance benchmarks: synthetic (SiSoftware Sandra 2004, PCMark 2004), office and multimedia applications (Business Winstone 2004, Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004), games (3DMark 2001SE Pro, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament 2003);
2. Battery life tests (Battery Eater Pro 2.30).

The results of the synthetic tests SiSoftware Sandra 2004 and PCMark 2004 are presented below, and they are good overall. The table also shows that both notebooks drop their performance in three times when they are powered by their own batteries as the systems start to save on the power resources.

So, the results of CPU Arithmetic Benchmark and CPU Multimedia Benchmark are very good and similar (3 percent in SiSoft Sandra) between the two notebooks as they have the same central processor, the 3.06GHz Mobile Intel Pentium 532 model. The processor performance of the A4S00G is 16 percent higher in PCMark04, however, due to the influence of side factors (different chipsets, graphics subsystems, hard disk drives, memory size). The memory performance differs, too, as the A4S00G comes with 512MB of memory against the A4B00L’s 256MB. The 5400rpm spindle rotation speed of the HDD of the A3S00G results in a higher HDD performance (the A4B00L uses a 4200rpm drive).

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 (unfortunately, Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 wouldn’t run on the ASUS A4S00G and I couldn’t do anything about that):

So, the results are good enough, and the A4S00G offers more performance in office applications than the A4B00L. The same A4S00G should have won Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004, too, but again, this test wouldn’t run on that notebook.

Here are diagrams for the same numbers: