Test results: 2D applications

Office applications can differ quite a lot but they mostly have one thing in common: they don't require a speedy graphics card in order to run smoothly. Most office applications also don't require lots of CPU power but when you start using newer applications and do some multi-tasking you might find out rather quickly that the faster your system is the more fluently it will keep running even with lots of windows and applications open at the same time. The following software tools give a view at how both notebooks score in CPU intensive applications and how they react when there is data to be stored in either the system memory or large storage devices.



Cinebench is based on Cinema4D and is excellent testing software to check how a system responds on rendering complex 3D models. Most stress is put on the cpu as you can see and that's where the MSI is a lot more powerful then the Acer notebook I have here, its about 5s faster in such a small computing time. Even in the low power Presentation mode the GX720 is just a tad faster then the Aspire, this is mostly due to the higher system base clock which boosts memory performance and NB latency. In office mode the GX720 becomes very slow though, poor software readout however limited us from telling what exactly has caused this.



3D Mark 2006 made the Acer system crash time over time and so we did not obtain any score, most likely it would score roughly 1400 points here as its performance is nearly on par with the GX720 in Presentation mode. The 300 higher points you get with Turbo mode will surely come in handy for those aiming for HWbot awards.



SuperPi is another cpu intensive task but in contrary to wPrime it does put quite a lot more stress to the memory. Knowing how the Centrino 2 P8400 comes with a 266MHz bus it is no surprise that the GX720 notebook takes the lead here rather easily. In Turbo mode we even managed to score under 20s in the short 1M run.



SiSoft's CPU tests is again a lot more cpu dependent, here we see the Acer finally topping out over the GX720 in Presentation mode, in normal or Turbo mode however it is again no match for the inferior MSI gaming notebook.



When we measure memory bandwidth it becomes a lot easier to understand how even at lower clock frequency the GX720 bests the Acer Aspire 5630, by clocking the Front Side Bus at 266MHz the Centrino 2 platform comes with 50% more memory bandwidth then the Aspire!



The HDTach performance numbers come somehow to a surprise because both notebooks have a disk which does 5400rpm, the GX720 does beat the Aspire 5630 rather easily though, at 50MB/s it puts down great performance for such a low power/low noise drive.



Overall system performance measured with FutureMark PC Mark 2005 again shows us how easily the GX720 defeats the older Acer notebook, even in low power profiles it can perform on par with the older tech.