Five Multimedia Notebooks, Tested

Test Results

We’ll report our test results in the form of a summary table (Table X), then follow each set of benchmarks with some description, discussion and analysis.

Table X makes three very interesting and potentially valuable points:

• The Sony VGN-AR790U/B posts a surprisingly high SYSmark 2007 result — it’s higher than both the HP HDX and the Eurocom D90X. Given that the Sony unit has a T9300 and the HDX a T9500, while the other devices are on par, it’s interesting that the Sony outperforms the HP. The fact that the Eurocom has a faster quad-core processor and the Sony runs a little ahead says that SYSmark 2007 doesn’t really assess the true abilities of the processor or its faster drives.

• When it comes to the rest of the benchmarks except for MobileMark (more on that in the next item), the range of equipment inside the various notebooks dictates their ranking for PCMark, MobileMark and Intel’s Digital Home Theater Capabilities Assessment Tool version 3.0. That said, both the Asus and the Acer units post very respectable showings, especially given their street prices.

• In a single word, multimedia notebook battery life is miserable. Here again, the Asus and Acer units put on a surprisingly strong showing in the MobileMark tests, and are the only machines to break 200 minutes of battery life on the relatively undemanding Productivity test. The Web surfing (Reader) and DVD playback (DVD) tests otherwise evoke times that range from slightly over one hour — nowhere near enough time to watch a full-length DVD on battery power — to just over two hours to as long as just over two-and-a-half hours for the simple surfing scenario. This only confirms the notion that notebooks like these aren’t really meant to operate in battery-only mode. Rather, the battery serves more as a kind of built-in uninterruptible power supply (UPS) rather than as a genuine permanent power source.

With these preliminaries behind us, let’s take a closer look at the various benchmarks by category, where we’ll explain what these instruments measure and what this set of measurements has to tell us.