- Joined
- Nov 25, 2001
- Location
- Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada
Hi guys,
I've got sitting here, my Compaq Presario, and my wife's Acer Aspire. She just won the Aspire, and she generously offered to swap me for the Presario if it's faster....
Basic specs
Presario
Turion ML-32 1.8Ghz 512KB up to 800Mhz hypertransport.
512MB RAM
60GB HDD
Radeon Xpress 200M integrated.
Aspire
Centrino Core Duo T2050 1.6G 533FSB 2MB L2
1024MB DDR2 RAM
100GB HDD
Intel Graphics media accelerator 950 (Actually seems to be 945 chipset)
So I'm futzing around with benchmarks, seeing what seems to be the "better" all round system, considering I'd like to play some games once in a while, not very recent ones of course, and do the all round geek stuff on it..
So far, Aspire gets a little more on 3DM2K1, but I'm suspicious of how it gets it, scores VERY high on lobby low detail, and if I start lobby low detail at the same time on both systems it's in sync at first, but then finishes a good 5 seconds before the Presario, which seems rather suspicious, like it's throwing out frames or something. It scores better on Nature too. Only has software rendering though. So I tried Aquamark3, and the Aspire gets buried, has a mere 5K while the Presario is just under 10K, quite a difference huh?
Some of the difficulty I'm having is not being sure what benchies are definitely using both cores on the Aspire and which are not, and also, the Presario seems to like clocking down to 800Mhz if it feels it's not being used very hard, irritating. Sisoft Sandra memory benches gave around 2G on the Presario and 3G on the Aspire, but the memory benching in the Science Mark suite gave the presario 4G and the Aspire 3G. I think it had clocked down the HT on the sandra bench. Science mark seems to realise there's 2 cores, but I don't know if it uses both. Presario beat the Aspire by a bit of a margin (5 secs) on the Cipher bench, and absolutely buried it on the Blas bench matrices. On the others the Aspire seemed a bit ahead, but using one core or two???? On the Sandra CPU benches, the Presario seemed to only get 60-70% of the Aspire's scores, but I'm pretty sure that that was really using both cores.
So, the more benchies I'm running the more confused I'm getting. I'm thinking that 80% of the stuff I'll run would only make use of a single core, so the faster single core performance is best. Then I'm also thinking that if I go to a 64 bit OS in future, with 64bit apps the Presario might even close most of the single core vs dual core gap.
For the rest of it, the sound really sucks on the Aspire, as does the keyboard, however the touch pad is nicer, and I like the gridvista tool. Presario has much better keyboard, and a sucky touchpad, though I'm probably going to use an external pointing device mostly. I understand I might be able to overclock the x200M slightly as well on the Presario, whereas there's nothing you can do about the level of suck on the intel IGP.
So anyhoo, it's bad enough when you're buying lappies checking spec against spec, you'd think it would be easier when you had two in front of you....
Can anyone suggest any good benchmarks, where it's obvious what's going on, i.e. how many cores are in use, and what the clockspeed and bus speed is at the time? Also is there any other benchmarks relevant to dx8 and dx9 performance I can try, I've got a feeling that the intel graphics driver is cheating on the 3Dmark ones.
So any tips for helping me sort these out would be great, kinda underwhelmed by the core duo actually, I had the impression that centrino cores were a lot faster, and that two of them should blow a near the same speed turion out of the water, but it's not really happening.
thanks,
Road Warrior
I've got sitting here, my Compaq Presario, and my wife's Acer Aspire. She just won the Aspire, and she generously offered to swap me for the Presario if it's faster....
Basic specs
Presario
Turion ML-32 1.8Ghz 512KB up to 800Mhz hypertransport.
512MB RAM
60GB HDD
Radeon Xpress 200M integrated.
Aspire
Centrino Core Duo T2050 1.6G 533FSB 2MB L2
1024MB DDR2 RAM
100GB HDD
Intel Graphics media accelerator 950 (Actually seems to be 945 chipset)
So I'm futzing around with benchmarks, seeing what seems to be the "better" all round system, considering I'd like to play some games once in a while, not very recent ones of course, and do the all round geek stuff on it..
So far, Aspire gets a little more on 3DM2K1, but I'm suspicious of how it gets it, scores VERY high on lobby low detail, and if I start lobby low detail at the same time on both systems it's in sync at first, but then finishes a good 5 seconds before the Presario, which seems rather suspicious, like it's throwing out frames or something. It scores better on Nature too. Only has software rendering though. So I tried Aquamark3, and the Aspire gets buried, has a mere 5K while the Presario is just under 10K, quite a difference huh?
Some of the difficulty I'm having is not being sure what benchies are definitely using both cores on the Aspire and which are not, and also, the Presario seems to like clocking down to 800Mhz if it feels it's not being used very hard, irritating. Sisoft Sandra memory benches gave around 2G on the Presario and 3G on the Aspire, but the memory benching in the Science Mark suite gave the presario 4G and the Aspire 3G. I think it had clocked down the HT on the sandra bench. Science mark seems to realise there's 2 cores, but I don't know if it uses both. Presario beat the Aspire by a bit of a margin (5 secs) on the Cipher bench, and absolutely buried it on the Blas bench matrices. On the others the Aspire seemed a bit ahead, but using one core or two???? On the Sandra CPU benches, the Presario seemed to only get 60-70% of the Aspire's scores, but I'm pretty sure that that was really using both cores.
So, the more benchies I'm running the more confused I'm getting. I'm thinking that 80% of the stuff I'll run would only make use of a single core, so the faster single core performance is best. Then I'm also thinking that if I go to a 64 bit OS in future, with 64bit apps the Presario might even close most of the single core vs dual core gap.
For the rest of it, the sound really sucks on the Aspire, as does the keyboard, however the touch pad is nicer, and I like the gridvista tool. Presario has much better keyboard, and a sucky touchpad, though I'm probably going to use an external pointing device mostly. I understand I might be able to overclock the x200M slightly as well on the Presario, whereas there's nothing you can do about the level of suck on the intel IGP.
So anyhoo, it's bad enough when you're buying lappies checking spec against spec, you'd think it would be easier when you had two in front of you....
Can anyone suggest any good benchmarks, where it's obvious what's going on, i.e. how many cores are in use, and what the clockspeed and bus speed is at the time? Also is there any other benchmarks relevant to dx8 and dx9 performance I can try, I've got a feeling that the intel graphics driver is cheating on the 3Dmark ones.
So any tips for helping me sort these out would be great, kinda underwhelmed by the core duo actually, I had the impression that centrino cores were a lot faster, and that two of them should blow a near the same speed turion out of the water, but it's not really happening.
thanks,
Road Warrior
