4. Testing The Durabook D14RY

Benchmarks

We decided to test the Durabook D14RY only under Windows Vista Business, which is the operating system that came with the notebook. Vista is the standard operating system for almost all of the notebooks sold today. So, we don't see much value in testing under Windows XP, except for the comparisons that we could make going back in history. We are willing to draw a line in the sand here, recognizing that we will have to make comparisons going forward.

We have not been successful running some of our traditional benchmarks under Vista. PC Mark05 and MobileMark 2005 are two examples. SYSMark 2004 also does not run under Vista, but BAPCo's new 2007 version of SYSMark does. So, we begin here using SYSMark 2007 in our tests. In addition we use 3DMark05, we're not comfortable with the measurements 3DMark06 provides, as well as our own homebrew battery life test, Lame (Wave to MP3 conversion), Ogg-Vorbis (Wave to Ogg-Vorbis conversion) and the Sandra suite of tests.

The Durabook's 3DMark05 score tells us everything we need to know about this notebook. It's not built for graphics. The long render time for the 3D Studio Max 8.0 benchmark reinforces this finding.

The D14RY's 11.1 V, 4400 mAh Li-Ion battery lasted about 2 hours in our DVD playing test, which is about what we expected. We set the display to a brightness between 60 and 70 candelas/meter^2. Then we loop a standard DVD until the notebook runs out of battery power and shuts down. We use this test because our standard test, MobileMark 2005 does not run under Vista. We anxiously await a Vista capable version of MobileMark.

These two encoding tests ran fairly slowly compared to low and high powered desktops. We have just started using these benchmarks for notebooks, so we don't have any comparable data.