Compaq Presario 900 1500+: The Radeon IGP Goes Mobile

The Test

We thought that it would make the most sense to compare the Radeon IGP chipset in the Presario 900 to the other mobile AMD capable chipsets out there. It is for this reason that we compared the Radeon IGP to the SiS 740 chipset found in the ECS i-Buddie XP. Bear in mind that both chipsets use integrated graphics solutions and thus are not too keen on running complex 3D games. We decided to test both chipsets under games just to give an idea of how performance of these solutions stand.

The SiS 740 chipset did find its way into a handful of mobile AMD systems including some OEM manufactured systems by ASUS and Alphatop. Although the ECS i-Buddie XP that we used as the SiS 740 platform is not a full notebook computer, we swapped out the system CPU with the 1500+ CPU found in the Presario 900 in order to even out the playing field.

Besides the Radeon IGP 320M and the SiS 740, the only other mobile AMD chipset out there is the aged KN133 chipset. The majority of mobile AMD notebooks out there today are actually using this chipset despite its very limited feature set (due to OEM's hesitation to go with a SiS/ALi mobile chipset solution). Unfortunately we did not have a KN133 notebook available at the time of review but you can be sure that both the Radeon IGP 320M and the SiS 740 will perform much faster than the KN133.

We left out the other notebooks we have reviewed for a number of reasons. First off, all but one notebooks we have reviewed uses discrete video solutions which will obviously not only perform faster than the integrated video solutions but are also targeted at a very deferent market. Secondly, with the exception of the i-Buddie XP, we have yet to get our hands on a Mobile Athlon XP based notebook. If you are interested in seeing what the performance difference between Athlon XP processors and Pentium 4 processors are, it would be better to take a look at our latest CPU review or compare the numbers in this review to the numbers gathered in our WinBook J4 2.4GHz review.

Also, being an integrated video chipset review, we decided to tone down the stressfulness of our benchmarks. Serious Sam The Second Encounter was tested with default settings, the numbers in Unreal Tournament 2003 are at medium detail settings, and our Jedi Knight 2 numbers were run with video set to "normal."