Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: hp, adds, amd | Themes: Business Notebooks
- 1. HP's Compaq Nx6125
- 2. HP's Compaq Nx6125, Continued
- 3. Case And Connectivity
- 4. Long Battery Life, Continued
- 5. Very Clear Labeling Of The Ports And Connectors
- 6. Very Clear Labeling Of The Ports And Connectors, Continued
- 7. Even More Ports? - A Docking Station!
- 8. A Bright, High Contrast Display, But Imprecise Fixed Backlight And Uneven Illumination
- 9. An Integrated X300 Graphics Core Is Perfectly Adequate For Office Applications
- 10. Keyboard And Displays
- 11. Onboard WLAN And PAN Module (Bluetooth)
- 12. Audio: Improved Microphone Position And Good Sound
- 13. There Is Whisper-soft Operation Most Of The Time
- 14. The Integrated Fingerprint Sensor And Security Suite
- 15. The Integrated Fingerprint Sensor And Security Suite, Continued
- 16. The Integrated Fingerprint Sensor And Security Suite, Continued
- 17. Benchmarks And Settings
- 18. The Compaq Nx6125 And The Competition
- 19. Battery Tests
- 20. Charging Times
- 21. Games
- 22. Games Direct X9
- 23. 3DMark05 (Synthetic DirectX 9 Benchmark)
- 24. PCMark04 (Synthetic Benchmark For CPU And RAM)
- 25. DivX Encoding With Auto Gordian Knot (mpeg 4 Encoding)
- 26. Lame MP3 Encoding
- 27. Sysmark 2004 SE (Office System Benchmark)
- 28. Summary
- 29. More on this topic
21. Games
Admittedly, game benchmarks are not suitable for demonstrating whether a business notebook is fit for everyday business applications or not. However, the results of the nx6125 should answer the question of whether you can play games with the system at all, and how large the performance gap is compared to a system with dedicated graphic chip and additional VRAM.
What we can say for sure, even without tests, is that laptops with integrated graphics are at a clear disadvantage when running 3D games. For one thing, the integrated cores have fewer pixel pipelines and shader units as a rule, and are clocked at a lower level than in dedicated graphic chips. Also, not only do the CPU and GPU share RAM in so-called Shared Memory Architecture, they also share RAM bandwidth. Thus, due to the peculiarities of this architecture, they are always at a disadvantage.
Games Open GL
Quake III Team Arena
The Open Graphics Library, OpenGL for short, was first developed for professional applications, but today it is quite common and frequently used in gaming. In contrast to Microsoft's Direct3D, OpenGL is also suitable for non-Microsoft platforms. The most recent version is OpenGL 2.0, but a lot of the OpenGL software on the market is still based on OpenGL versions 1.5 or older.
Quake III Arena is sensitive to changes in CPU and RAM performance. We still use this game to rank the performance level of a system: whether the PC running as fast as it should.
If you simply compare the nx6125 values with those of the Dell Inspiron 6000, which is equipped with a dedicated x300 graphics chip, it becomes very clear that the Shared Memory Architecture seriously reduces PC performance. If you remember the Quake III results of our comprehensive AMD Turion 64 tests, you can see that this reduction in performance is not primarily due to a slow CPU. In these tests, the Turion 64 system was admittedly inferior to a comparable Intel system. The difference between the two was much smaller than here, as you can read in "The Turion 64 Inside Story Part II".
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