Tests Yield Few Surprises

Battery Life Blues

Battery life and power consumption are a hot issue concerning today's laptops. Though the 166-MHz systems led the way in terms of battery life, the 200- and 233-MHz laptops fell short of expectations. Keep in mind that factors such as screen lighting, hard disk, and memory strongly affect battery life. For example, something as simple as taking out half of your RAM ca n add 20 percent or more battery life. Sacrificing powerful components for longer battery life, however, may not be an option for those who need a laptop that can double as a desktop.

The Performance Predicament

Performance among the 166-, 200-, and 233-MHz machines varied widely in our tests. However, some general trends did surface from the benchmark results:

• Stable drivers play an important factor in a system's overall performance.
• Systems with faster processors tend to be faster, but in some cases, the difference is a very small margin.
• Systems with write-back cache tend to be faster.
• Systems with 512-KB cache tend to be faster.
• Unsurprisingly, 233-MHz machines are typically faster than 200-MHz machines.

"Tend to be" means "in general"; there are lots of counterexamples. Some systems are better designed than others. If we factor out the lower-performing Eurocom 7200 and Micro International 7200/mint from our tests, the 200-MHz and 233-MHz machines score fairly well.

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MMX Performance

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Average MMX scores (scaled 1 -10) compared by CPU speed.