General Application Performance

Wrapping things up with our performance testing, we have results from the Futuremark PCMark testing suites as well as some of our own application benchmarking. When it comes to running your office, multimedia, and Internet tasks, most modern laptops are more than fast enough. What follows are a few of the more strenuous application benchmarks - 3D rendering and video encoding - that put more of an emphasis on high CPU speeds. If you don't do that sort of thing on your computer, you will probably find that just about any Core 2 Duo processor is more than fast enough.

Futuremark PCMark05

Futuremark PCMark Vantage

3D Rendering - CINEBENCH R10

3D Rendering - CINEBENCH R10

Video Encoding - DivX

Video Encoding - QuickTime

The Acer and AVADirect laptops have a faster CPU than the M-152XL, which shows up in a few of the tests. The AVADirect is slightly faster in both PCMark tests because of its 7200 RPM drive, but overall the differences aren't enough to worry about. Even the fastest notebook we've tested (the Sager NP9262) is only 10 to 40% faster than these midrange notebooks in application performance. At three times the price, that's not much of a benefit.

High Detail Gaming and 3DMark Battery Life, Power, and Noise
Comments Locked

26 Comments

View All Comments

  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 - link

    The same way as in http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=339...">previous articles, which is to say we ran the built-in test. It may not represent actual gameplay 100%, but that's not really possible with any benchmark of any game, since specific scenes/levels are always slower for faster. The idea is to show the relative performance of the laptops. If memory serves, the built-in performance test usually provided higher numbers than regular gameplay by 10-20%.
  • bob4432 - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 - link

    did you have to unlock anything? the reason i ask is because when i run the benchmark test i get 63fps avg from an x1800xt to a 4850 to a 8800gtx to a 9800gtx @ 1280x1024 - 1680x105....rigs have 2-3GB of ram and are running from x2 4200s to e2160@3Ghz to a quad rig
  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 - link

    You need to add the -novsync option to the command line argument.
  • bob4432 - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 - link

    command line?
  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 - link

    You'll need to manually create a shortcut to the game executable (RelicCOH.exe). Then right-click on the shortcut and choose properties. In the Shortcut tab, under target, add -novsync at the end of the line (after any quotes or other stuff). The 1.70 patch enabled VSYNC by default to provide a higher quality rendering experience, and the Readme file details the above command-line parameter.
  • bob4432 - Thursday, September 18, 2008 - link

    thanks for the info - ended up w/ 106fps avg w/ a decent o/c'd 4850, e2160@3GHz and 3GB ddr2-667, so i am happy w/ that. pretty impressed w/ that 7811fx machine. thinking of myself moving up to a 24" 1920x1200 lcd here in a couple days and figure that my next rig will be crossfire since i will probably need it but not too shabby for the price i paid for this current gpu. only thing is the damn heat output :)

    again, thanks

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now