How we test.... notebooks

Computer Shopper’s notebook benchmarks are designed to test how well a notebook will cope with the toughest kinds of tasks that you’re likely to throw at them. We don’t run any office application tests, as real-world office usage will never be enough to push your notebook to its limits. Instead, our suite of tests includes audio and video encoding, image editing and genuine games.

All results are plotted against a reference PC’s benchmark scores, so you can see immediately how a notebook stacks up against this ’average’ desktop PC: an Evesham Athlon 3500+ system. This way you can directly compare notebook performance against desktop PC performance. Scores in the Computer Shopper Application Benchmarks are actual percentages of the reference performance, so a PC scoring 200 there is twice as fast.

Computer Shopper

WHAT IT DOES: When we developed our Windows benchmarks we had two goals. First, we wanted to run really taxing scripts. Today’s notebooks have no problem running office applications such as Word and Excel, so we focussed our tests on areas where you could have difficulties.

In version 2.0 there are four scripts. Encoding a short video to MPEG2 format is an extremely processor-intensive task, and one that anyone transferring home videos to DVD will have to tackle. Our image-editing test runs a session of photo enhancement using Paint Shop Pro X, culminating with the composition of a panorama from a set of digital snaps. Next, a set of MP3s is generated by ripping a series of WAV files. Finally, we wanted to be able to test multitasking performance, which today’s dual-core processors are supposed to excel at. In our multi-task test we set the PC compressing a DVD video file to WMV format, and then our image-editing test springs to life. Our second design goal was enhanced accuracy and reproducibility, which helps make our benchmark scores the most dependable on the newsstand.

Our suite of tests puts a notebook through the toughest tasks that you’ll be running

PCMark04

DOWNLOAD: http://www.futuremark.com/download/?pcmark04.shtml

WHAT IT DOES: PCMark’s suite of tests analyses and tests every aspect of your notebook’s general Windows performance. Its tests are particularly useful for discovering which components are the slowest. One of the main reasons that we run this benchmark is that you can download your own copy from www.futuremark.com and test your existing notebook to see how it compares.

Doom 3

WHAT IT DOES: Doom 3 is one of the most visually stunning games on the market and perfect for testing graphical performance. The engine uses OpenGL, so it’s a good indication of how any game using this technology will perform.

While Doom 3 has a built-in demo, we didn’t feel this pushed graphics cards far enough, so we recorded our own demo which contains more outdoor scenes. To test a graphics card’s performance Doom 3 plays our demo back as fast as it can. The number of frames in the demo divided by the time it took to play it gives us a score in frames per second. You can run our time demo on your home PC if you have a copy of Doom 3. In Windows Explorer open your Doom 3 directory, open the base folder and create a new folder called demos. Download our test file to this folder. Start Doom 3 and set it to the settings above and press CTRL+ALT+¬ (key to the left of ’1’). Type timedemo timedemo1 and press Return. The first test is jerky, while Doom 3 caches texture data, so run the test a second time to get the true performance figure.

The outside scenes in Doom 3 really push a graphics card to its limits

Battery life

WHAT IT DOES: Our battery life test opens a web browser and scrolls through an electronic copy of War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, at reading speed. We set the display to half its maximum brightness to conserve battery life. We disable automatic power scheme functions, preventing the notebook from turning off the display or going into hibernation.

The test simulates light computing tasks, like browsing web pages or reading through a word document. If you are doing processor or disk intensive work then your battery life will be considerably reduced.

War and Peace is a very long book, so the notebook’s battery is bound to fail before the end

Reference System

Evesham Axis 35/939
Athlon 64 3500+ (Socket 939)
ECS KN1 Extreme nForce 4 motherboard
1GB DDR RAM
256MB Point of View 7800GT graphics card
200GB Western Digital SATA hard disk

Shopper Application Benchmarks: 100
PCMark04: 4377
Doom 3: 91.8fps
Battery life: 180mins