ATi Mobility Radeon 9700
Test System Details & Winstones
CONFIGURATION / TESTING METHODS: We tested the ATi Mobility Radeon 9700 with a Eurocom notebook powered by a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 processor. The rest of the system's components consisted of 1024GB of RAM (512MBx2), dual 60GB hard drives, a DVD drive and a motherboard based on Intel's i865 "Springdale" chipset. We lacked another notebook with similar specs, driven by a different GPU, so throughout this review we've compared the Mobility Radeon 9700's performance to a similarly configured desktop machine using two different graphics cards, a 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro and a 128MB Radeon 9600 XT.
To keep as many system configurations variables as similar as possible, we installed the same Intel chipset drivers and the same version of ATi's Catalyst Driver Suite on the laptop and desktop machines. We also configured Windows in the exact same manner and installed every available Windows Update. Before benchmarking, we removed Messenger from the system, set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance" and then installed our benchmarking software. We ran all of the following tests with the video drivers configured for maximum visual quality.
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| Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz Motherboard: Eurocom i865P "Springdale" Chipset System Memory: 1024MB DDR PC3200 RAM Graphics Card: Mobility Radeon 9700 (256MB) Drivers: Intel Chipset Drivers ATi Catalyst 4.4 DirectX 9.0B On Board Audio Hard Drive: Dual IBM Travelstar 60GB |
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ZD's Business and Content Creation Winstone 2004 benchmarks aren't meant to test video performance, but because many of you have asked if a "desktop replacement" notebook, like the one we're testing here, is really as fast as a high-end desktop machine, we thought we'd throw in some scores just for a point of reference.
| Business Winstone 2004 •_Microsoft Access 2002 •_Microsoft Excel 2002 •_Microsoft FrontPage 2002 •_Microsoft Outlook 2002 •_Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 •_Microsoft Project 2002 •_Microsoft Word 2002 •_Norton Antivirus Professional 2003 •_WinZip 8.1 |
Content Creation 2004 •_Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1 •_Adobe Premiere 6.50 •_Macromedia Director MX 9.0 •_Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 6.1 •_Microsoft Windows Media •_Encoder 9 Version 9 •_NewTek's LightWave 3D 7.5b •_Steinberg WaveLab 4.0f |
We're not going to dwell on these scores much, as they're more of an indication of total system performance than anything else. The somwhat low scores can not be attributed to the Mobility Radeon 9700. As you can see in the graphs above, however, the notebook wasn't quite able to hang with the desktop systems. However, it did come close. We suspect that with a faster hard drive (the mobile Travelstars simply can't hold a candle to WD's Raptor) and lower latency RAM, the notebook's performance would be right up there with the desktop machines. Who says a high-end machine needs to be crammed into a full tower?
