General Application Performance
Wrapping things up with our performance testing, we have results from the Futuremark PCMark testing suites as well as some of our own application benchmarking. When it comes to running your office, multimedia, and Internet tasks, most modern laptops are more than fast enough. What follows are a few of the more strenuous application benchmarks - 3D rendering and video encoding - that put more of an emphasis on high CPU speeds. If you don't do that sort of thing on your computer, you will probably find that just about any Core 2 Duo processor is more than fast enough.
The results for the application testing are hardly surprising: faster CPUs result in better performance. PCMark is the only suite where HDD performance also plays a significant role, so the P-171XL gets a bonus over the other laptops with its RAID 0 HDDs and manages to take first place in PCMark Vantage. CINEBENCH and PCMark Vantage both support 64-bit operation as well as 32-bit operation, and it's interesting to see the performance increase in those two applications. The desktop processor and DDR2-800 memory in the Sager notebook both combined to make it the fastest notebook and most of the tests, although there was an anomaly in QuickTime encoding. The encode process wood finish, but when it came time to write the files to the hard drive the Sager system seemed to stall, taking about 20 seconds for what is usually a 3 second task. We're not quite sure what caused this problem, but it's likely that chipset driver updates should address the issue.
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JarredWalton - Monday, September 1, 2008 - link
We reviewed that http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=324...">six months ago. Dell hasn't updated it to support the 9800M (yet?), but otherwise it would be very comparable in performance to the Sager unit. The Sager is still a bit faster because of the desktop CPU, and it consumes a bit more power and is a bit heavier. The Dell is also more expensive because of the cost of mobile CPUs, so if you want i.e. an X9000, it's over 3X the cost of an E9500. Since both weigh a lot and cost a lot, you might as well get the fractionally larger Sager/Clevo.cheetah2k - Monday, September 1, 2008 - link
I understand you reviewed the 1730 6+months ago (and I bought one based on that review with the extreme CPU and SLi 8800GTX's) however some of us would like to see how it still stacks up to the competition, and being a "round-up" and all, I think it makes sense to include it, even if its just for old time sake.JarredWalton - Tuesday, September 2, 2008 - link
I did mention the laptop, and there are a few games where we tested on both laptops. However, we don't generally get to hang onto $5000 laptops for a long time, so I can't just go back and retest the M1730. In terms of performance, the Sager is going to be slightly faster on the CPU, but overall gaming performance is a tie. If I were to pick between the two now, I would probably go with the Sager for the high-end, because price is a bit cheaper for the same level of performance. Plus you can run quad-core if you want (though that's not really useful for games). I'd be much more likely to go with the Gateway units for the price, but obviously the Dell and Sager are over twice as fast in most games.SniperWulf - Friday, August 29, 2008 - link
While I agree with you on the astetics of the P series, its price/performance ratio and upgradability are unmatched at the moment. A few months back, I picked up a 6860FX and have been nothing but pleased with it. I've replaced the CPU with a used X7800 ES, and swapped the hard drives for 2x Hitachi 200GBs in a Raid 0 array.I didn't do it all at the same time of course, but thats the beauty of it. Whenever you need a lil bit more horsepower, all you have to do is just shop around for parts
Kardax - Friday, August 29, 2008 - link
I took a chance and got a P-7811 a couple weeks ago. Its stability has been rock-solid, even after hours of intense load.My only complaint would be that the keyboard has a Bluetooth enable/disable option, but there's apparently no Bluetooth hardware inside...
JarredWalton - Friday, August 29, 2008 - link
Hi guys,I'm *sure* there are typos in the article (or errors in speech recognition). I've spent most of the past two days trying to finish all the writing and graphs, so go easy on me while I get some sleep. In the meantime, if you want to point out errors, reply to this post and we'll (eventually) correct them. Hopefully, none of the issues "ruin" the article for you or make it "unreadable". ;-)
Good night,
Jarred Walton
Senior Editor