Synthetic Benchmarks: PCMark05, 3DMark06
PCMark05 is another popular testing suite that explores the general system performance as well as the performance of individual subsystems.
The diagram hardly reveals anything principally new. The notebook built with Core 2 Duo T5600 processor is about 7% faster than the notebook with Core Duo T2400 processor.
When we compare the performance during the execution of algorithms loading the computational processor resources most of all, the new microarchitecture manages to get a little farther ahead: the performance improvement makes 10%.
However, the most interesting results were revealed in the memory test. Two absolutely identical mobile systems equipped with the same dual-channel DDR2-667 SDRAM with 5-5-5-15 timings performed dramatically different. Keeping in mind that both processors, Core 2 Duo T5600 and Core Duo T2400 feature the same L2 cache memory and work at the same clock speed, the 25% performance advantage of the CPU with Core microarchitecture can only be assigned to the new memory technologies aka Intel Smart Memory Access. In reality, it is all about extremely aggressive data prefetch.
As for the performance of the tested notebooks in the gaming graphics applications, we resorted to 3DMark06 here. Note that thanks to ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics adapter used in ASUS F3Ja notebooks, they performed quite well in contemporary 3D graphics applications. In other words, you can play modern games on these notebooks easily, and the results in the diagrams below prove it:
The tested notebooks provide quite acceptable level of graphics performance in 3D mode. The system equipped with Core 2 Duo processor runs about 3% faster than the competitor. This relatively small difference can be explained by the fact that this benchmark is primarily intended to estimate the graphics cards performance.
However, 3DMark06 also includes a test that allows estimating the processor performance during typical calculations in contemporary 3D games, i.e. when calculating the environmental physical and opponents’ AI.
Although the graphics performance is not of primary importance in this case, the difference in results is not dramatic again. Core 2 Duo T5600 is only 3.5% faster than Core Duo T2400.