14. Battery Charge Times

When charging under a load, the more powerful AC adapter pays off. Only a few other notebooks can fully charge their batteries under these relatively extreme conditions as quickly.

Games Open GL

Quake III Team Arena

The Open Graphics Library, better known as OpenGL, was originally developed for professional applications. But today it's widely use and often finds a place for itself in computer games. In contrast to Microsoft's Direct3D, OpenGL also works on platforms outside the Microsoft world. Currently OpenGL 2.0 is available, but the majority of OpenGL-based software available on the market today is still based on OpenGL 1.5 or older versions.

Quake III Arena responds sensibly to variances in CPU and memory performance. We still use this game to assess a system's performance capabilities. Our chief query usually is: "Does the computer run as fast as it should?"

This benchmark clearly belongs to the Pentium M system because of its big L2 cache, because more of the program code can run from the cache. But for both the Mobile Sempron and the Turion 64 CPU, performance scales upward in tandem with faster RAM.