General Usage Performance

AMD has usually fared better in business applications of late, and it was a bit of surprise to see the Voodoo Envy M:855 land just shy of the highest end Pentium-M 1.7GHz processor. It is likely that the M:855 will slightly surpass the Pentium-M 1.7GHz with the new PowerNow drivers, but this will depend on how Voodoo modifies their PowerNow drivers.

To be honest, we have some reservations over the scores for the Voodoo Envy M:855 - Athlon 64 DTR 3200+ (2.0GHz) in these benchmarks. We expected the scores to be slated above the Pentium-M scores and lower than the desktop Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz). In our talks with Voodoo, the culprit may be the premature PowerNow drivers. Similar to the SpeedStep issues, PowerNow sometimes causes benchmarks to report scores incorrectly, because the benchmark derives the wrong timing from the CPU, which is changing in response to the simultaneous operations. It is possible that these scores are correct, but we have our suspicious. The new PowerNow drivers should clear things up.

The Test Content Creation Performance
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  • Madcat207 - Tuesday, November 4, 2003 - link

    No offence, but bad review.

    The Voodoo was put up against no real competition, so of course it won. Why did anandtech not bother with getting a Sager 5680 or 8890 to compare with, since those are P4 machines with real 9600 pros....
  • TheInvincibleMustard - Tuesday, November 4, 2003 - link

    1) Is it hard to have the product in question (ie, the one being reviewed) highlighted in some way on the graphs? It can't be that hard to do the bar in red or whatever. Granted, when comparing the M10 to the Go5650, there's not as much sense, but when comparing 10 or so CPU's it'd sure be nice to quickly identify what stands where.

    2) Should the X2 performance scores with 4xAA/8xAF be taken with a grain of salt? Why does the M10 increase approx 25% going from 1024x768 to 1280x1024 ... ?
  • Adul - Tuesday, November 4, 2003 - link

    The battery life performance will come in part 2 of this review.
  • AlexWade - Tuesday, November 4, 2003 - link

    Deat AT:

    What is the battery life on this notebook? I but notebooks based on battery life, not performence.

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