ATi's Radeon IGP320M Chipset A New Chance For Athlon Notebooks

11. Application Level Benchmarks

Let's now move across to the 'real McCoy,' the application level benchmarks. We are starting with BAPCo's Sysmark 2002, a benchmark that still leaves some open questions about its methodology, but for now it is the standard benchmark for system evaluation. I still continue to say that it is definitely hilarious to give office application performance the same weight as Internet content creation performance, since all of us are using software for word processing, spreadsheets or Internet browsing, while only a minority is creating Internet content every day (and an even smaller minority good Internet content, but that's a different story ...). Still BAPCo generates the overall result of Sysmark from office productivity and content creation in a 50:50 fashion, which is why we do not publish this useless and misleading overall result.

BAPCo SYSmark 2002 Results

Let's start with the more important office productivity score. Here you can see the huge impact of the low memory bandwidth of the Athlon-based notebooks. In a reasonably configured desktop system, an Athlon 1300 is well able to beat Pentium III 1.2 GHz, and an Athlon XP 1600+ beats Pentium 4 1.6 GHz as well. The score of the Presario 725CA is indeed pretty low, while the prototype ATi IGP320M notebook is at least able to come into second place. Make sure, however, that those numbers don't fool you! Each of those four notebooks has plenty of performance to give you a perfectly fluid impression while you work with them. I used the Presario notebook for a few days and had no complaints about its office performance.

The less important Internet content creation run of Sysmark 2002 shows different results. It seems as if it was tuned for Intel's "Northwood" Pentium 4. Especially the Flash 5 part appears a bit mysterious to me. Anyway, neither Pentium III, nor AMD's Athlon's have the slightest chance to reach the incredibly high Pentium 4 scores. The Radeon IGP320M prototype notebook, however, still scores very well. Again, both Athlon notebooks are slowed down by their low memory bandwidth.