ASUS T9 Notebook

Performance - Overall Performance

The average laptop owner will be using their laptop for office type tasks. Due to existing limitations in many notebook systems, 3D gaming, advanced designing, and other complex tasks are left to the desktop systems. For this reason we choose to focus our benchmarks on tests that accurately simulate typical notebook use, which can vary from notebook to notebook. With the T9's integrated video, the system was never designed to run 3D rendered games. Instead it was designed to run productivity applications. SYSMark 2001 and Content Creation Winstone 2002 allows us to see exactly how the system performs in such situations.

First let's take a look at general system performance provided by Office Productivity SYSMark 2001 which makes use of Word, Excel, Netscape, and the like. This benchmark gives a good idea of how a system will run when loaded down with office type applications running congruently. For more information on the SYSMark 2001 benchmark, click here.

General Performance Office Productivity SYSMark 2001 Desktop 900MHz Desktop 800MHz Desktop 733MHz ASUS T9400 900MHz Desktop 600MHz ASUS T9400 700MHz Desktop 533MHz Desktop 466MHz 96 95 93 85 79 72 71 62 | 0 | 19 | 38 | 58 | 77 | 96 | 115

The above graph shows results that should not be too surprising. One can clearly see something that we have known for a long time: laptops are slower than desktops regardless of CPU clock speed. In the case of the ASUS T9, the entire system running at full speed on AC power performed more like a desktop between 600MHz and 733MHz system than a 900MHz one. The combination of a slower hard drive, a more crowded system bus (thanks to the notebook's lower bus speed as well as the additional information traveling over the bus thanks to the shared video buffer), somewhat slower chipset, and more all came together to bring overall system performance down quite a bit. For the same reasons, pulling the plug and dropping the CPU speed to 700MHz made the system act like a 533MHz desktop; much slower than it was actually clocked. This is not to say that all 900MHz laptops will perform at these levels: the performance of the ASUS T9 is dependent not on the CPU speed but the overall design and the components used in it. Let's see how SYSMark rated the ASUS laptop in overall performance.

Overall Performance SYSMark 2001 Desktop 900MHz Desktop 800MHz Desktop 733MHz ASUS T9400 900MHz Desktop 600MHz ASUS T9400 700MHz Desktop 533MHz Desktop 466MHz 99 94 90 86 75 71 67 59 | 0 | 20 | 40 | 59 | 79 | 99 | 119

Again we see the ASUS T9 acting more like a 733MHz desktop system than a 900MHz one. The standings for the notebook on AC power did not change much, when the system was running on battery it performed much more like a 600MHz desktop than a 533MHz one like we saw in the Office Productivity benchmark.