X-bit labs

ASUS W2P00VB Review: More than Just a Notebook (page 9)

Category: Mobile

by Galina Sudareva

[ 05/16/2005 | 09:05 AM ]

Both notebooks perform very well in SiSoftware Sandra 2005 and PCMark 2004, too. These tests, benchmarking not only the speed of the system at large but also of all its subsystems, are clear evidence of the advantages of the new version of the Centrino platform over the older one. Note also that both notebooks slow down almost in double when they switch to work on their batteries and the systems enter the power-saving mode. The results of the tests are presented in the following table:

SiSoftware Sandra 2005 reports the CPU of the W2P00VB performs 47% faster in average than the CPU of the W1J00Ga (the results produced by PCMark04 seems to be closer to reality; the difference of 6% corresponds better to the difference between the clock rates of the processors, that is 2.13GHz against 2.0GHz). The memory subsystem of the ASUS W2P00VB consisting of DDR2 SDRAM clocked at 533MHz is found to be 20% faster than the DDR333 SDRAM employed in the W1J00Ga (this is the average percentage for both tests).

Using a faster hard drive, the W2P00VB is about 9-14% ahead of the W1J00Ga in the disk subsystem tests.

The higher bandwidth of the PCI Express interface tells on the results of the graphics subsystem tests: PCMark 2004 says the graphics subsystem of the W2P00VB outperforms the W1J00Ga by 10%.

The ASUS W2P00VB doesn’t go far from the results of the W1J00Ga in games, although we might have expected better. On the other hand, this can be explained by the use of the new PCI Express interface in the new notebook. The graphics controller is also designed for this interface and the advantages of PCI Express, particularly its high bandwidth, are only going to show up more clearly in upcoming applications. So far the performance of the W2P00VB in games is not much better than that of the ASUS W1J00Ga with its older AGP-interfaced controller.

So, these notebooks passed the 3DMark03 3.40 test successfully, with the following results:

As you can see from the table, the W2P00VB is about 10% and 12% faster than the W1J00Ga when powered from the wall outlet and by the battery, respectively. The gap grows somewhat in the autonomous mode because the notebooks drop down the frequency of the central processors, and the W1J00Ha drops it to 600MHz, while the W2P00VB to 800MHz. That’s why the latter has a certain advantage in this mode.

Next, we tested the notebooks in 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 W1J00Ga is 28% ahead of the W2P00VB in the first mode. With the second preset, however, the W2P00VB wins, being 5% faster than the W1J00Ga. The results are listed in the next table:

For better comparison, the numbers are presented as diagrams below: