6. Performance: MobileMark 2005 And PCMark05

• Portege M400-S4032...
• • LAPTOPSOFCOLUMBUS
  • $699.00

MobileMark 2005

The M400's battery lasted 4 hours and 6 minutes under MobileMark 2005's least demanding test, the reader benchmark. The battery kept going for 3 hours and 27 minutes while running the DVD playing benchmark. That's long enough to play two DVDs.

The MobileMark 2005 Office Productivity benchmark does not run under Windows Tablet PC. When an MS Office application starts, Windows asks that Tablet PC input capabilities be loaded for the application. This terminates the Office Productivity benchmark. I was able to come up with an Office Productivity battery life estimate of 3 hours and 40 minutes by interpolating from battery life values that were recorded until the test failed. Because the Office Productivity benchmark doesn't run its course, it isn't possible to compute an Office Productivity Score or Average Response time score. This is unfortunate, because it would be most interesting to calculate the impact of the Tablet PC operating system itself on performance under the benchmark. My guess is that Tablet PC would slow performance noticeably.

PCMark05

The following three charts present the PCMark05 CPU, memory and hard disk drive scores for the Toshiba Portege M400 and two other non-Tablet PC Intel Core Duo-based computers I tested in the past, Fujitsu's Lifebook N6410 and HP's Pavilion dv1000t. See my interpretation of the results after the charts.

The Portege's slight faster CPU gives it a slightly higher PCMark05 CPU score.

The M400's slightly better memory score is probably related to its 512 MB of memory as opposed to the HP's and Fujitsu's 1 GB. Less memory means less memory management and in a test like this can mean a higher performance score.

Though the M400's disk drive is speced at 5400 RPM, it performs more like a 4200 RPM drive. Looking at the five sub-tests of the PCMark05 hard disk drive test, I found no place where the M400's drive ran proportionate more slowly than the drives on the Fujitsu and HP computers. It's also interesting that the 7200 RPM drive in the Fujitsu performed worse than the HP's 5400 RPM drive even though the Fujitsu's average seek time is 10 ms compared to the HP's 12 ms. The M400's disk performance is a mystery which I will pursue with Toshiba. If and when Toshiba can shed some light on the issue, I'll let you know.