Testing: Performance - Windows Experience Index
Performance: Windows Experience Index (WEI)
Windows Vista includes built-in performance benchmarks for components. There are performance tests for the processor (calculations/second), memory (operations/second), graphics processor (not specified), and hard disk drive (data transfer rate). The results of each component test are reduced to an index number, which is presented as the performance number for each component in the WEI. An overall score is also reported, which is the lowest score that a computer achieves on the component tests. This is a rather arbitrary way to summarize performance, so it is very important to look carefully at the component tests as well as the Windows Experience Index itself.
As you’ll note below, each notebook’s WEI score is simply the lowest score it achieved on the components tests.
Processor performance is pretty much in line with the speed of each notebook’s processor.
All of the notebooks have pretty much the same memory. WEI memory performance seems fairly tightly tied to processor performance.
3D graphics on these relatively low powered notebooks refers to business graphics, not to gaming graphics. The two notebooks with older Intel GMA 950 graphics processors (Sony and Toshiba) perform more poorly than the ones with Intel’s GMA X3100 graphics processor, which was introduced in late 2007.
Aero and desktop graphics performance is quite similar to 3D graphic performance, with the X3100 graphics processor equipped notebooks performing better.
Sony’s solid state disk drive does best in these tests, but not super well, as might be expected. This appears to be a function of the WEI hard disk drive benchmark. See the PCMark Vantage disk drive tests on the next page for a more spectacular performance from the Sony’s 60GB SSD.
