ASUS T9 Notebook

The Test

In order to evaluate just how fast the any given notebook is as a whole system, each notebook review we do will compare the notebook being reviewed to similarly configured desktop solutions. In this case we built a system using an unlocked 900MHz Pentium III processor running on an 815 board with 128MB memory, a GeForce2 MX video card, and a standard ATA100 hard drive. We are aware that both the video card in the desktop system as well as the hard drive are going to perform better than their notebook counterparts, but that is the whole point. One would think that every system based off a Pentium III 900MHz chip would perform similarly in 2D content creation and office tests. This, however, is far from the truth. Although in the desktop world we think of slower hard drives or video cards as minor slowdowns in system performance, they are a huge bottleneck in notebook systems. Therefore, by comparing a notebook system to a desktop system that contains your run of the mill desktop components we can see just how fast a notebook system compares to a desktop system. You will be surprised by how much performance between the two can differ.

We also attempted to underclock the desktop testbed in order to make it perform more like its notebook counterpart. This was done to show what desktop speed a given notebook acts like. For example, our ASUS T9 was running at on a 900MHz CPU but we had to underclock our desktop 900MHz testbed by around 200MHz to make it perform more like the notebook. More on this in the test sections.

The notebook was tested in both AC as well as battery mode. You may recall from earlier that the 900MHz Pentium III takes advantage of Intel's SpeedStep technology which dynamically underclocks the CPU to 700MHz when on battery power. Running the tests when in battery mode shows how the system will perform when the cords are cut.

Battery life tests were performed using BatteryMark 2001 under Windows 2000 (as BatteryMark 2001 does not seem to work properly under Windows XP). The test was performed using the recommended settings at a screen brightness of exactly 50%.

Note that gaming benchmarks were not performed on this system due to the limited nature of the integrated 815EM graphics chip.