Performance

The results of the synthetic SiSoftware Sandra 2004 and 2005 and PCMark04 tests are tabled below:

The results of the two versions of SiSoftware Sandra can actually be compared as you can learn from our previous reviews where I ran Sandra 2004 and 2005 on one and the same notebook.

As you can see from the table, the results of the two computers are roughly similar in the CPU Arithmetic and CPU Multimedia benchmarks as the they use Intel Pentium M processor models that have the same frequency (1.6GHz) but differ in the amount of L2 cache memory (1024MB against 2048MB), core, and manufacturing technology.

As for the memory subsystem tests, the ASUS M5A is about 31% faster than the Acer TravelMate 6003LCi in SiSoftware Sandra and about 22% faster in PCMark04. That’s natural since the ASUS uses DDR2 SDRAM clocked at 400MHz, while the Acer works with DDR333 SDRAM.

The hard disk employed in the ASUS M5A (a 60-gigabyte Hitachi HTS541060G9AT00 with an 8MB cache buffer) delivers about 28-34% more performance than the Acer’s 40GB Hitachi IC25N040ATMR04 with a 2MB buffer.

PCMark04 also suggests that the ASUS M5A has a much faster (by about 41%) graphics core than the Acer. It’s natural as the M5A makes use of the new graphics subsystem Intel GMA 900 with 333MHz core frequency and up to 224 megabytes of dynamically allotted memory.

The next table shows you the results of Business Winstone 2004 and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 tests.

So, the ASUS M5A is about 8% (26% when powered by the battery) faster than the Acer TravelMate 6003LCi in Business Winstone 2004 and 16% (33%) faster in Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004. The differences in the configurations of the notebooks, particularly their chipsets, graphics subsystems and hard drives, determine this outcome.

As you can note, both notebooks slow down almost in double when they work on their own batteries.

The same results are diagrammed below for better comparison:

It’s also interesting to compare the performance of the ASUS M5A and the Acer TravelMate 6003LCi in games. Notebooks based on the second-generation Centrino platform have quite different characteristics, including those of the integrated graphics core. The results of the ASUS M5A are indicative of the technical improvements in this aspect.