8. The Benchmark Setup

You might have missed the hard drive in the listing above, but that has a reason. This article is not a notebook comparison per se, but a technology review. Thus I tried to test each notebook under as equal conditions as possible. For the benchmarks, I used the same hard drive in each notebook, so that hard drive performance would not impact the numbers. The drive used was the very fast IBM Travelstar 60, a 5400 RPM drive with a capacity of 60 GB. Right now it's one of the fastest notebook hard drives available.

All tests were run under Windows XP Professional. The two Athlon notebooks had the latest CPU device driver installed to enable AMD's PowerNow!, while the two Intel-based notebooks did not require any additional software for Intel's SpeedStep. For the battery rundown tests I adjusted the screen brightness to 50%.

The Benchmark Results

Low Level Benchmarks

Before we go and have a look at the results of the application level benchmarks, it's always a good idea to have a peep at the "raw" results. Sisoft's Sandra is still the by far best software for this kind of thing.

Sandra CPU Performance

Those, really rather theoretical, numbers show that the most powerful CPU in this comparison should clearly be the Mobile Athlon XP 1600+. Of course, this depends heavily on the software.