X-bit labs

Santa Rosa + Vista: Three Notebooks Reviewed (page 18)

Category: Mobile

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 11/04/2007 | 04:18 PM ]

General Performance

The new version of SYSmark testing suite, SYSmark2007, that measures the systems performance in real applications arrived right in time for our tests. As a result, we managed to check out the notebooks performance in real tasks.

You should pay special attention to the results of Asus A8Sc and Toshiba Satellite A100-906 on the diagram above. These mobile systems are based on different platforms, Santa Rosa and Napa Refresh, however, their processors work at almost the same clock frequency of 1.8GHz.

As we see from the obtained results, the new mobile platform allows building faster notebooks. There are a lot of factors contributing to it, and we have already pointed them out above. However, the advantage we observe here is hardly determinative. The performance difference between Asus A8Sc and Toshiba Satellite A100-906 doesn’t exceed 10%. Nevertheless, let’s take a look at the detailed score charts.

This testing scenario creates a tutorial web-site with diverse media content. It involves the following applications: Adobe Illustrator CS2, Adobe Photoshop CS2, Macromedia Flash 8 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2003. In this case the performance difference between Santa Rosa and Napa Refresh is pretty negligible.

This test deals with creating videos using non-linear editing and special effects. The videos are put together from several sources, including static images. The final video is made in two formats: HD and for online internet viewing. In this case the following applications are involved: Adobe After Effects 7, Adobe Illustrator CS2, Adobe Photoshop CS2, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9 and Sony Vegas 7. And again Santa Rosa demonstrates a slight advantage. Only Lenovo Thinkpad T61 mobile computer performs impressively here, as it features a faster CPU and more system memory than its two rivals.

The next scenario emulates typical office work including e-mail, data processing, project management and document editing. These are the applications involved: Microsoft Excel 2003, Microsoft Outlook 2003, Microsoft PowerPoint 2003, Microsoft Word 2003, Microsoft Project 2003 and WinZip 10.0. Under this type of workload Asus A8Sc gets far ahead of Toshiba Satellite A100-906. It might be the higher processor bus frequency and memory subsystem frequency that affect the performance in this case.

The last test deals with creating an architectural presentation with a photorealistic image of the object and a fly-around video of the projected building. There are only two applications used: AutoDesk 3ds Max 8 and SketchUp 5. Of course, processor computational resources are being loaded the most in applications of this kind that is why the results of Santa Rosa and Napa Refresh platforms with processors working at almost the same frequencies are quite close.