8. Synthetic Benchmarks

SiSoft Sandra 2002 Benchmarks: CPU, Multimedia And Memory

With a desktop CPU that didn't have power-saving SpeedStep technology, it didn't make much sense to run tests on the ThinkPad G40 using different Windows power schemes. So we went with AC power and the "Always On" power scheme for all our readings.

Thanks to its hyperthreading capabilities, the desktop CPU in the mini PC has a head start on the notebook CPU, which does not support hyperthreading (HT). If you deactivate HT in the BIOS of the mini PC, you can see that this performance boost does not come from the nominally faster FSB.

When it comes to memory bandwidth, there's no question who's the king of the hill. The notebook technology doesn't have a chance against the desktop technology. And if you select dual-channel RAM in the desktop system, the two platforms end up being light-years apart.

Of course, the shared-memory design of the graphics memory is what keeps the G40's memory bandwidth at a low 1700 MByte/s.

Since the graphics card shares the memory bandwidth, there isn't much left over for the processor. You can observe the same phenomenon in desktop systems with shared-memory architecture.