X-bit labs

ASUS V6J Notebook on Intel Dual-Core Processor (page 9)

Category: Mobile

by Alexander Britvin

[ 04/21/2006 | 10:36 AM ]

Performance

As usual, we will first run the synthetic benchmarks SiSoftware Sandra 2004 and PCMark 2004. The former benchmark measures the overall performance of the system as well as that of each of its subsystems, while PCMark 2004 measures the performance of the computer in office and multimedia applications and also produces performance scores for the main subsystems (CPU, memory, graphics, and disk subsystem).

I am very pleased with the results because Intel’s Core Duo processors prove to be much faster than the previous generation of single-core Pentium M (Dothan) and Turion 64 – you can refer to any of our earlier notebook reviews to see that. The tech sample enjoys a certain advantage due to its higher CPU, memory and graphics card speeds. The notebooks become about 40% slower and similar in performance when they switch to work on their batteries because their CPU frequencies are stepped down to 1GHz in this mode to save power.

The Business Winstone 2004 test runs scripts of the following real-life office applications, several scripts at a time: Internet Explorer, Outlook, Word, Excel, Access, Project, PowerPoint, FrontPage, WinZip, and Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition.

The Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 test determines the performance of a computer in the following multimedia applications: Windows Media Encoder, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere, NewTek LightWave 3D, Steinberg WaveLab, Dreamweaver MX, and Director MX.

The results of these two tests are presented below:

It is the central processor that bears the biggest load in Winstone tests, so the tech sample is faster due to its higher CPU frequency and to having more and faster memory. The performance doesn’t drop down that lower as with the Pentium M (Dothan) in the power-saving mode because the bottom frequency for the Core Duo is 1GHz. The overall performance hasn’t improved much since the previous Centrino platform because these tests do not use multi-tasking and the second CPU core is idle.