9. SiSoft Sandra 2002 Benchmarks: CPU, Multimedia And Memory, Continued

The two machines remain neck-and-neck in memory bandwidth. Normally, you would expect the score to be close to the theoretical upper limit for memory bandwidth of 2,100 megaBytes/s (DDR2100 RAM). The real value is 1,700 MB/s, however, because both devices rely on the shared-memory architecture for their graphics RAM.

Since the graphics card shares the memory bandwidth, there isn't much left over for the processor. We ran a control test with a low monitor resolution and reduced color depth, which only confirmed this fact. Measurements taken with an SVGA resolution are around 1,800 MB/s. Ramping down the color depth from "True Color" to "High Color" increases memory bandwidth by another 100 MB/s.

In keeping with the Windows power-scheme strategies , using the "Max battery" or "Presentation" power schemes will throttle down the CPU speed and, by extension, the memory bandwidth of both machines.