Benchmark Results: Media
It wasn’t hard to guess the outcomes of our gaming tests—a simple gander at each laptop’s spec sheet tells that tale. Less predictable are the media tests, some of which are optimized for threading and others aren’t.
Interestingly, iTunes demonstrates the best performance on Eurocom’s Montebello, which is only a dual-core chip, but does feature the fastest clock speed in our roundup. The ASUS, with Intel’s newer T9400, takes a second place finish and is followed by Killer Notebooks’ Odachi. Alienware’s m17x, with its older Core 2 Extreme X9000 comes in last place.
Clock speed matters less when your software can take advantage of parallelism. The Odachi blows away its dual-core competitors here, with the nearest contender being Eurocom’s Montebello.
The DivX test takes advantage of as many as four cores, while this version of XviD tops out at two (in the future, we’ll explore a newer version able to take advantage of four threads). The results are pretty clear: in threaded apps, Killer Notebooks’ Odachi does very well, slashing minutes from our rendering benchmark. When parallelism isn’t in play, the results are much closer together. The Odachi’s Core 2 Quad Q9650 still wins out in XviD, but by a much smaller margin.
