X-bit labs

ASUS M5A Notebook: Compact, Lightweight and High-Performance? (page 6)

Category: Mobile

by Galina Sudareva

[ 05/02/2005 | 10:37 PM ]

So, the performance of the ASUS notebook is good in 3DMark 2001SE Pro as the tables below indicate. Two graphics quality modes are used: 1) 1024x768, 16-bit color, Z-buffer and textures and 2) 1024x768, 32-bit color and textures and 24-bit Z-buffer:

The ASUS M5A wins this test, of course. It is about 40% faster than the Acer TravelMate 6003LCi in the first mode and about 58% faster in the second mode. The new platform now supports such subtests as Game 4, Environment Bump Mapping, Pixel Shader 2.0, Advanced Pixel Shader and even performs quite well in them. The higher performance of the ASUS M5A is due to the new integrated Intel GMA 900 graphics subsystem that features a higher graphics core frequency (up to 333MHz), larger amounts of memory supported (up to 224MB), hardware DirectX 9.0 acceleration, four pixel pipelines, Pixel Shader 2.0 and OpenGL support. This core can now run tests from 3DMark 2003 3.40, so here’s a table of the results for this benchmark, too:

I ran Quake 3 with two graphics quality presets:

• 640x480; 16 bit; Lighting:Vertex; Detail:Low; Texture Quality:16 bit; Texture Filter:Bilinear
• 1024x768; 32 bit; Lighting:Lightmap; Detail:High; Texture Quality:32 bit; Texture Filter:Trilinear

The Acer TravelMate 6003LCi turns to be about 15% faster than the ASUS M5A with the first preset, but the latter wins the test at the high image quality settings, having a 46% faster frame rate. The results follow below:

I think the ASUS M5A is slower at the low-quality settings because it is a PCI Express platform and its graphics subsystem is also oriented to using this bus rather than AGP. The advantages of the PCI Express interface are going to be more apparent in future applications.