Acer Aspire 2020 - Centrino desktop replacement

The Test

Our last mobile benchmark suite for laptops included 2002 edition Winstones, and we have since upgraded to the 2004 editions. Because of this, we won't be scaling many of our old laptops for comparison with current and future notebooks that we review. To bridge this gap, we have included scores for the Dell Inspiron 8600 (with GeForce FX Go5650) as somewhat as a marker.

Desktop scores have been pulled straight from our Intel 925X & LGA-775 coverage.

Windows XP Professional Test System
	Acer Aspire 2020	Voodoo Envy M:860	Voodoo Envy M:855	Dell Inspiron 8600	IBM T41
CPU(s)	Pentium-M 745 1.8GHz	Athlon 64 DTR 3400+	Athlon 64 DTR 3200+	Pentium M 1.7GHz	Pentium M 1.7GHz
Motherboard(s)	Acer 855GME	Voodoo K8T800	Voodoo K8T800	Dell 855PM	Dell 855PM
Memory	512GB PC2700	1GB PC2700	1GB PC2700	512MB PC2700	1GB PC2700
Hard Drive	80GB 4200RPM	60GB 7200RPM	60GB 7200RPM	60GB 7200RPM	60GB 7200RPM
CDROM	DVD±RW	DVD±RW	CD-RW/DVD	DVD+RW	CD-RW/DVD
Video Card(s)	ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB DDR	ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB DDR	ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro 64MB DDR	NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5650 128MB DDR	ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 Pro 32MB DDR
Ethernet	Onboard Broadcom Gigabit	Onboard VIA 10/100	Onboard VIA 10/100	Onboard Intel Gigabit	Onboard Intel Gigabit
Operating System	Windows XP Professional SP1
Video Drivers	ATI 8.00 (latest available for Acer)	ATI 7.963 (latest available for Voodoo)	ATI 6.14.10.6378	NVIDIA 44.82 (latest available for Dell)	ATI 7.933
Benchmarking Applications	ZDM Content Creation Winstone 2004 ZDM Business Winstone 2004 BAPCo Mobile Mark 2002

As mentioned earlier, our system came configured with 1GB of system memory (this is the default configuration for the M:860). This may have been a stretch before, but this is fairly standard now for high-end DTR systems and as such, we won't handicap the system by removing a stick, especially since dual channel is one of the benefits in a DTR system.

Even though the Aspire 2020 uses a Mobility Radeon 9700, we won't be doing any graphic benchmarks, particularly since the gaming scores that we are getting with the notebook are fairly in line with our Mobility Radeon 9700 review and because we need to rework our mobile graphic benchmark suite a bit. We should be updating the review with scores in the near future, once we establish the suite issue and get a larger array of shipping MR9700 and Go5700 notebooks against which to compare it.