I’m not a big fan of benchmarking tests like PCMark and 3DMark because I don’t feel like they give the average user a good idea of how a PC will perform in real-life scenarios. Over the past two years, this hasn’t been much of an issue because most of the laptops I’ve reviewed have been netbooks with Intel Atom N270, N280, or Z520 processors. In other words, they all performed pretty much the same.
Sure, there was the occasional Intel Celeron or VIA Nano chip thrown in for good measure. But for the most part, if you picked up a laptop with a 12 inch or smaller display for under $500 between 2007 and mid-2008, odds are it had an Intel Atom CPU. So I didn’t have to work that hard on the performance section of my laptop reviews.
Well, the times, they are a-changing. Soon Intel will launch its updated Intel Atom platform and it’s likely that we’ll start to see machines with Intel Atom N450, D510, and other chips hit the market. But more importantly, Intel is promoting its Consumer Ultra Low Voltage (CULV) platform for 11 to 12 inch thin and light laptops. AMD has its NEO line of processors. And we’re well past the days when a processor’s clock speed could tell you all there was to know about its performance.
So in order to help keep track of the new systems with processors like the Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300, Intel Pentium SU4100, Intel Pentium SU2700, Intel Celeron 743, and AMD Neo MV-40, I’ve put together a list of common CPU-intensive tasks that you might expect to do on a portable laptop. This includes transcoding audio and video files, copying a large number of files from one directory to another, and creating a zip file.
I’ve already used this method to test the performance of the Acer Aspire 1410 laptop (with Windows Vista Home Premium and a single core Intel Core 2 Solo SU3500 CPU), and HP Mini 5101 netbook.
But since I probably won’t be able to test every single netbook and ultraportable laptop released over the next few years, I wanted to make my benchmarking tools available to the public. And it occurred to me that some of the files I was using in my tests were copyrighted and shouldn’t be distributed. So I’ve put together a new set of benchmarking tools which are available for download here.
Today I have results for the Asus UL30A, a 13.3 inch laptop with an Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 processor.
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Asus redefined the concept of thin and light notebooks when it launched the Eee PC line of netbooks in 2007. While the Asus UL30A isn’t quite as revolutionary, it’s a remarkable laptop that weighs about 3.7 pounds and gets nearly 10 hours of battery life.
