Performance

The Sony VAIO VGN-S2HRP has good results in synthetic SiSoftware Sandra 2004 and PCMark04 tests which determine the performance of the system at large and of all its subsystems in particular. When powered by its own battery, the notebook is 2.5 times slower than when it’s attached to the power grid. To check out this fact in more detail I ran ThrottleWatch 2.0 which can report the current frequency and voltage of the central processor. I took the measurements in two modes: Always On and Max Battery.

So, we can see that the clock rate of the CPU goes down from 1597MHz to 599MHz and its voltage from 1.34V to 0.988V when the notebook works on its battery. This explains the significant performance hit that occurs when the notebook is working on its own.

The results of SiSoftware Sandra 2004 and PCMark04 are listed below:

The performance is good, but the test of the graphics subsystem would abort, producing an error massage. But apart of that, the rest of the results are quite objective.

Business Winstone 2004 and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 tests are most important for the Sony VAIO VGN-S2HRP, since this notebook is intended for comfortable and stable work in office and multimedia applications. These benchmarks run scripts of various real applications (several at a time). The results follow:

The Sony VAIO VGN-S2HRP feels more confident with office applications, having a higher score there – you can see that clearly when it works on its battery. The same numbers are represented in the following diagram, for people who prefer to think visually: