Compaq Presario 900 1500+: The Radeon IGP Goes Mobile

Performance - Overall Performance

We start the Radeon IGP 320M vs the SiS 740 comparison by looking at SYSMark's Office Productive benchmark. This program makes use of Word, Excel, Netscape, and other office-type programs and gives a good idea of how a given system will perform under stressful office environments.

Office Performance Office Productivity SYSMark 2002 ECS i-Buddie XP 1500+ Compaq Presario 900 1500+ 99 87 | 0 | 20 | 40 | 59 | 79 | 99 | 119

The first thing you will likely notice when looking at the above graph is the performance difference between the ECS i-Buddie XP 1500+ and the Compaq Presario 900 1500+. At 14%, it represents the largest performance gap between the two systems in our benchmark suite. This was surprising for us and we wished to explore the cause of the performance delta between the two chipsets.

At first we thought that the different hard drives in the system could be cause of the slow down. The spec sheets show that the Toshiba drive used in the Presario 900 has a 13ms access time while the IBM drive in the i-Buddie XP has a 12ms one.

Looking at the Content Creation Winstone 2002 scores, we could throw out hard drive differences as the cause of the slowdown. As we already proved, Content Creation Winstone 2002 is a highly I/O intensive benchmark; one that would surely show the differences between two hard drives. Since the Content Creation Winstone 2002 numbers did not vary greatly, we can rule out hard drive differences as the cause of our slow down. The performance gap is likely caused by something else.

Since the remainder of the two systems remain essentially the same, we figured that the difference must be caused by the chipsets. It is likely that we are right. See, the ECS i-Buddie XP is actually not a notebook computer, rather it is a desknote system meaning that all the internals of the i-Buddie XP are desktop components. Now it is true that fully portable notebook systems do make use of the SiS 740 chipset, however the version found in notebook computers is slightly different than the desktop version. According to an e-mail from SiS on the subject, the company said that the performance of the SiS 740 desktop chip will be higher than the performance of a SiS 740 mobile chip because the notebook chips enable power saving functions of the chipset. Apparently these power saving features cost performance.

We can not be sure how much performance goes down when the SiS 740's power saving features are enabled (since we did not have a notebook with the chipset available for testing) but there is no question that it would eat into the lead that the chipset has over the Radeon IGP 320M. Based off the fact that the two chipsets are so similar, we suspect that the performance of the Radeon IGP 320M and the mobile SiS 740 would be about the same.

Overall Performance SYSMark 2002 ECS i-Buddie XP 1500+ Compaq Presario 900 1500+ 120 112 | 0 | 24 | 48 | 72 | 96 | 120 | 144

As a result of the performance difference experienced in the Office Productivity portion of SYSMark 2002, the overall SYSMark 2002 scores of the i-Buddie XP 1500+ and the Presario 900 1500+ differ by 7%. In this instance the performance difference between the two is not nearly as striking as the performance difference experienced in the Office Productivity test due to the fact that the two systems performed nearly identically in the Internet Content Creation portion of the benchmark.

Again, keep in mind that the SiS 740 on the i-Buddie XP is the desktop version and that performance will go down by some amount in the true mobile version.