page-5 | Acer TravelMate Timeline 8371T. A well designed companion | Laptops

Acer TravelMate Timeline 8371T. A well designed companion - Benchmark

Sunday, 26 July 2009 18:24 Allan

Deprecated: Function eregi() is deprecated in /home/laptop-review.eu/public_html/administrator/components/com_sh404sef/sh404sef.class.php on line 2914

Deprecated: Function eregi() is deprecated in /home/laptop-review.eu/public_html/administrator/components/com_sh404sef/sh404sef.class.php on line 2915

Deprecated: Function eregi() is deprecated in /home/laptop-review.eu/public_html/administrator/components/com_sh404sef/sh404sef.class.php on line 2914

Deprecated: Function eregi() is deprecated in /home/laptop-review.eu/public_html/administrator/components/com_sh404sef/sh404sef.class.php on line 2915

Deprecated: Function eregi() is deprecated in /home/laptop-review.eu/public_html/administrator/components/com_sh404sef/sh404sef.class.php on line 2914

Deprecated: Function eregi() is deprecated in /home/laptop-review.eu/public_html/administrator/components/com_sh404sef/sh404sef.class.php on line 2915

Deprecated: Function eregi() is deprecated in /home/laptop-review.eu/public_html/components/com_sh404sef/sef_ext/com_content.php on line 39

Article Index
Acer TravelMate Timeline 8371T. A well designed companion
Specifications
Physical aspects
Physical aspects continued
Benchmark
Benchmark continued
Conclusion
All Pages

Page 5 of 7

Benchmark

All benchmarks are run at highest performance settings on the laptop. Otherwise no settings have been tinkered with.

Windows Vista Experience Index:

The index is alright but hardly impressive. It’s not bad either, though.

We tested a notebook from Toshiba earlier – it’s in the same sort of price range and also aimed at business users. The display is slightly bigger at 14 inches, but all in all they’re quite similar so let’s see how they measure up.

The Toshiba Tecra M10-10H model had the following specifications:

Processor:
Core 2 Duo P8400. 2.26GHz

Chipset:
Intel GM45

RAM:
2048GB DDR2 800MHz

Hard drive:
160GB

Display:
14" WXGA+ TFT 1,440 x 900

GPU:
Mobile Intel® GMA 4500MHD

Battery:
lithium-ion

Inputs/outputs:
3x USB
1x Ethernet
1x 56K modem
1x ExpressCard
1x VGA
1x Firewire
1x eSATA

Wireless connectivity:
Bluetooth 2.0
Wireless LAN (802.11a/g/Draft-N)

Dimensions:
W x D x H : 336.8 x 245.0 x 36.4 (front)/38.4 (rear) mm
Weight : starts at 2.44 kg

Operating system:
Windows Vista Business Edition

Price:
Around £700 incl. VAT.

Boot times and out of standby:

Boot and out of standby times are measured from when the power button is pressed and the Windows desktop appears.

The Acer starts up just a little quicker – it may be because of the faster RAM and such, or perhaps it doesn’t need to load as many programs at startup. If you can’t stand waiting the extra 20 seconds the Toshiba needs, the Acer is the better choice. It means little to me, personally.

Battery life:

Idles times are measured at the lowest power profile on the tested models while Classic times are tested at the highest performance profile. Both are tested with BatteryEater 2005 to find the maximum battery life at the given settings.

There is no doubt the Acer offers a longer battery life; since we are dealing with ultraportable computers aimed at business users on the go, this is a fairly important aspect. I definitely think it’s worth it to sacrifice other aspects – like performance – for a longer battery life.

The processor:

SuperPi:

Super Pi calculates the number Pi with 1 million decimals. The result is a time in seconds, meaning that the lower the number, the better. This can be used for direct comparison with other laptops that have run the same test.

Here you can see the faster processor in the Toshiba win the battle of number crunching. It’s obviously something to keep in mind when you’re getting a new computer, but it also illustrates that the two manufacturers have made different choices as to where to save money and where to spend it.

SiSoft Sandra CPU Arithmetic:

SiSoft Sandra’s Whetstone and Drystone benchmark tests the processor’s ability to do pure number crunching, which occurs during gaming or different forms of picture editing. The measure is in Mflops (Millions Floating Point Operations Per Second) – the higher, the better.

Much the same here as above; no doubt the processor in the Toshiba is faster not only in theory but also in practice.

SiSoft Sandra CPU Multimedia:

The multimedia test in SiSoft Sandra is calculated on a 2D figure. The output (it/s) is Mandelbrot iterations per second, i.e. the bigger the better.

In our review of the Toshiba we were unable to get a result in this category due to problems with the new version of SiSoft, which is why they’re simply shown as zero. I still put up the results of the Acer so you can compare them with other reviews on the site for example.