Testbed and Methods

I checked the performance of the ASUS W1B00Na out in Microsoft Windows XP Professional with DirectX 9.0a installed. Before the tests, I disabled power-saving and network services, the audio subsystem, antivirus software, and screensavers. The notebook was tested at the maximum and minimal screen brightness settings and at the maximum resolution of the LCD matrix.

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 (Business Winstone 2004, Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004), games (3DMark 2003 3.40, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament 2003);
2. Battery life tests (Battery Eater Pro 2.30).

Performance

The ASUS W1B00Na did well in synthetic SiSoftware Sandra 2004 and PCMark04 tests that are intended for benchmarking the performance of the entire system as well as of its subsystems. The results are tabled below:

As you see, the ASUS W1B00Na drops its performance down by 50-60% when powered by the accumulator battery as the system starts saving on power resources.

To check out the performance of the notebook in office and multimedia applications I used Business Winstone 2004 and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 tests that run scripts of the following real applications: Internet Explorer, Outlook, Word, Excel, Access, Project, Power Point, Front Page, WinZip, Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition (these are tested by Business Winstone 2004) and Windows Media Encoder, Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, NewTek LightWave 3D, Steinberg WaveLab, Dreamweaver MX, Director MX (tested by Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004).

The results follow:

The performance of the ASUS W1B00Na is expectedly good in these tests. Here’re the same numbers in a diagrams, for those who think visually: