The results of office and content-creation benchmarks like Business Winstone 2004 and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 should also be interesting for a prospective owner of the ASUS S200N or S300N, since these notebooks are likely to be mostly used with such applications. So, the two above-mentioned benchmarks run scripts of office (Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Power Point, Microsoft Front Page, WinZip, Norton Antivirus Professional Edition) and multimedia (Microsoft Windows Media Encoder, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, NewTek LightWave 3D, Steinberg WaveLab, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX, Macromedia Director MX) applications and measure the time it takes to run each script through.

The results are given in the following table:

You understand that the scores are low, but after all, this is natural for computers with a Pentium M processor of 1GHz frequency. When powered by the battery, the notebooks both drop their performance by 30% as the system automatically enters the power-saving mode. The results of the S300N are about 4% better in Business Winstone 2004 than those of the S200N, and 2% better in Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004. This difference is explained by the sub-notebooks using different memory (the i855GME chipset of the S300N supports DDR333 SDRAM, while the i855GE chipset of the S200N only supports DDR266 SDRAM).

Sandra 2004 confirms that the two notebooks use the same processor, giving them about the same scores in the CPU test. Due to the above-mentioned difference in the memory subsystems, the ASUS S300N is about 11% faster than the S200N in the memory test. Curiously, the S200N is found to have an 8% slower disk subsystem than the S300N.

The following table contains the SiSoftware Sandra 2004 scores:

The reviewed sub-notebooks are not intended for playing games. Anyway, let’s try to evaluate their gaming capabilities. We ran 3DMark 2001SE Pro in two modes:

• 1024x600 resolution, 16-bit color depth, Z-buffer and textures;
• 1024x768 resolution
• 32-bit color depth and textures, and 24-bit Z-buffer.

The following table suggests that the notebooks are different in graphics applications.

Well, the results are rather poor due to the slow CPU (1GHz clock rate) and the DVM technology. The slower memory of the S200N is the reason for its being 8-12% slower than the ASUS S300N. When powered by their batteries, the sub-notebooks cannot provide playability in dynamic DirectX 9.0 games.