19. Benchmark's

To rate battery life and computer performance we use two test suites: BAPCo's MobileMark 2005 and FutureMark's PCMark05. We'll take a look at what each of these tells us in the sections that follow.

The MobileMark 2005 benchmarks test the behavior of a mobile computer running solely on battery power. There are four separate battery life tests: Office Productivity, Read and Search, DVD Playback, and Wireless Web Browsing. Every test uses real world applications and runs from the time when the battery is fully charged and the power supply is disconnected from the test machine, to the point when the battery is fully discharged and the PC shuts itself off.

Test results are written to a log file every 10 seconds. In addition, MobileMark 2005 constantly keeps tabs on two performance values during execution of the Office Productivity test: it calculates an overall performance value and an average response time for the completion of all activities that occur during this test. The overall performance value builds upon the average response time measured, but is expressed in relation to a standard reference system outfitted with average components, whose value is set at 100 points. Applications used in the Office Performance tests are multitasked.

PCMark05 puts all its emphasis on brute performance and assumes that the test units are plugged into a wall socket. PCMark05 includes an overall system test suite, along with test suites for individual system components including the CPU, RAM, graphics and hard disks. If one part of the test suite won't run or fails during execution, an overall PC Mark score is not computed.

Point scores for PCMark scale in a range from 1,200 to 5,500 points. Both the lower (1,200) and upper (5,500) ends of this scale are based on results obtained from actual reference systems. Nevertheless, it's possible for a test system to score less than 1,200 or more than 5,500 points by under- or over-performing with respect to those reference systems.