X-bit labs

A True American: Dell Latitude D620 Notebook Review (page 9)

Category: Mobile

by Alexander Britvin

[ 12/07/2007 | 10:40 AM ]

Performance

As usual, we will first run our synthetic benchmarks.

The SiSoftware 2007 suite features an updated enhanced-functionality interface, runs on three platforms (Win32 x86, Win64 x64, WinCE ARM), contains 13 tests and 34 informational modules, and supports a large range of devices thanks to the developer’s collaboration with Intel, AMD, ATI, SiS and VIA. The program is supported in six languages and has a free Lite version for personal and educational purposes. SiSoftware Sandra measures the overall performance of the system as well as that of each of its subsystems.

PCMark benchmarks the computer performance in office and office-related applications and also produces performance scores for the main subsystems (CPU, memory, graphical, and disk subsystem). PCMark 2005 carries on the tradition of complex benchmarks of the series and uses fragments of real-life applications as tests. This makes it somewhat more relevant for end-users as opposed to fully synthetic benchmarks. After running a series of 11 tests on the different components of the system, the program calculates an overall performance score in units called PCMarks. PCMark 2005 can check a computer out at processing HD video and encoding audio, and offers enhanced tests of the CPU and hard disk under multi-threaded load. The overall score is calculated by the formula: PCMark Score = 87 x (the geometric mean of the basic tests), where the geometric mean is calculated as (Result 1 x Result 2 x…) divided by the number of results.

The Intel Core 2 Duo T5500 performs as expected in our tests. Its frequency is reduced to 1.0GHz in the power-saving mode which leads to a proportional reduction of the test results. The HDD with a SATA interface looks preferable to its ATA opponent. The graphics subsystem of the Dell notebook, on the contrary, looks weaker than the Sony’s one because the Quadro NVS is meant for business applications rather than for 3D games. The results of the memory subsystem tests are sometimes similar and sometimes not. Overall, these numbers indicate that the Dell notebook has two 512MB modules working in dual-channel mode as opposed to what was reported by CPU-Z.

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

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

The following table and diagrams show the outcome of these tests:

These tests are sensitive to the CPU performance, so it is no wonder that the identical CPUs deliver almost the same speed. The results are lower in the power-saving mode proportionally to the CPU frequency reduction.