External Graphics Upgrade for Notebooks

3D Application and HD Video Playback Benchmarks

Specviewperf is a mixed bag, with the ViDock showing some impressive gains over the integrated chipset, on average, but a couple of rogue benchmarks are showing parity with the integrated chipset. It’s quite possible that these particular benchmarks are favoring the integrated graphics’ communication speed with the system over the ViDock’s ExpressCard interface.

When it comes to HD video playback at the 1920x1080 resolution, the ViDock Pro is absolutely invaluable. Since the integrated Radeon Xpress 1150 has no HD acceleration, CPU utilization stayed close to 100%, yet playback still stuttered and was unwatchable! Contrast this with the ViDock, which allowed for HD acceleration on the GPU, removing the lion’s share of the decoding and lowering CPU utilization to about 10%. More importantly, playback was as smooth as butter.

What we didn’t notice during the smooth playback of the film is that CPU utilization was occasionally spiking to 100% and then, just as quickly, dropping back to about 10%. While this is a puzzling result, we didn’t have time for more testing. As we said, it didn’t seem to affect playback quality, but it’s something we’ll definitely be investigating in a future ViDock review.

It is very important to note that only the ViDock Pro will offer this kind of HD video acceleration; the cheaper ViDock Business edition is probably not able to accelerate HD video to this extent.

Regardless of the CPU utilization playback anomaly, the verdict is in: benchmarks show that the ViDock Pro offers a major increase in gaming performance over an integrated Radeon Xpress 1150, a major increase in performance for most professional 3D applications, and the ability to play back HD video, where the integrated solution falls flat on its face.