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Article Index
Acer TimelineX 4820 - Acer leads the way
Specifications
Construction and Design
Benchmark
Gaming
Conclusion
All Pages

Benchmark

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

Windows Vista Experience Index



We can see the device gets a very nice WEI score. That only adds to our expectations, of course.

I have decided to compare it with the Novabook Airis Pro, which costs approximately £50 more than the Acer. It will be interesting to see if Acer can get the same job done for a smaller amount of money. Do note that one reason for the higher price is that Novabook has an SSD rather than a conventional hard drive. In fact I expect the Acer to perform better in the other aspects.

The Novabook Airis Pro device had the following specifications:

Category
Business, Students

Processor
Mobile DualCore Intel Core 2 Duo T6600, 2200 Mhz (11 x 200)

Chipset
Intel Cantiga GL40

RAM
4 GB

Hard drive
40 GB SSD Kingston

Display
15.4 inch / 1280 x 800 LCD (WXGA)

Sound card & speakers
Intel HDMI 828011B ICH9 High Definition Audio Controller

GPU
Intel GMA 4500M

Battery
6-celled lithium-ion-battery (Li-Ion)

Optical drive
Optiarc DVD RW

I/Os
2x USB 2.0 ports
1x HDMI™ (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) with HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection) support
1x External display (VGA) port
1x Headphones/speaker/line-out jack with S/PDIF support
1x Microphone-in jack
1x Ethernet (RJ-45) port
1x DC-in jack for AC adapter
1x eSATA port
1x Multimedia card reader
1x Webcam Crystal Eye
1x Microphone

Wireless connectivity
Wireless 802.11b/g
Ethernet LAN 10/100/1000

Dimensions
3.3 cm x 35.7 cm x 25.7 cm
ca. 2.7 kg including battery

Operating system
Windows 7 Professional 64 bit

Boot times and out of standby



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

Both devices start up pretty quick, managing to do so below the magical 1-minute mark.


Battery life



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

You can see battery life is one of Acer’s stronger suits. It is clearly superior, which is good news for people who like to travel with their laptop. The battery lasts long enough for a train or plane ride, which allows you to get some work done.
The device we tested is a so-called PR sample, and as such not an entirely finished product. In our case, this meant the battery was not quite up to snuff, with some of the cells operating below optimal capacity. As such, the actual battery like is sure to better than shown here.

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.

Acer’s processor handles number crunching remarkably well and is a fair bit faster than the Novabook. A very convincing result.

SiSoft Sandra CPU Arithmetic & Multimedia



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.

The multimedia test in SiSoft Sandra calculates on a 2D figure. The result (it/s) is Mandelbrot iterations per second, and the bigger the better.

Again we see the Acer doing almost twice as well; there is no doubt the Core i5 or i7 processor is well worth the extra cost. The new Core 2010 processors are really quite spectacular, dramatically outperforming normal Duo Core processors as they can handle more processes simultaneously.

The Novabook did not run the multimedia test, but we can see the Acer gets a fairly good score. No surprises here either.

RAM SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth



Sisoft Sandra’s Memory Bandwidth benchmark is used to measure the speed of the RAM – the higher the value, the better.

The RAM also perform better in the Acer. This is however quite natural as it is DDR3 vs. DDR2 RAM in the Novabook.

Hard drive performance - SiSoft Sandra Harddisk Read



Sisoft Sandra’s hard drive test module is used to measure the performance of the hard drive. Sisoft Sandra runs a number of tests on the surface of the hard drive and calculates the average reading speed.

Acer’s hard drive performs well for a 5400RPM drive, but this test really shows why the Novabook costs more: the incredibly fast SSD. The performance you can get out of them is amazing, and once they reach a lower price level, we are sure to see them in many more devices.


GPU performance - 3Dmark



The 3Dmark tests show the performance in DirectX 9, and paint a picture of the performance in newer games and applications. No tests have been run in DirectX 10.1 (which both cards support).

The Acer has an ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 5650 GPU that you can switch to when needed, rather than use the powersaving but low-performing integrated graphics. As such the device can actually perform quite well when needed – it may not be a dedicated gaming device, but it can certainly handle some mainstream games and that helps make it more of an all-round device.
We can clearly see the Novabook falling behind here. Well done by Acer.

CineBench R11.5



Here are scores of various CineBench tested devices. You can see our device does pretty well. We will be doing direct comparisons in the future when we have tested more laptops in this benchmark.

Overall performance



The PCMark 05 results can be compared directly with other laptops that have run the same PCMark version. The program produces a score from a test that includes the performance of the processor, RAM, hard drive, GPU, etc.

As expected, we see Acer getting the highest score in the overall test. All in all you have to conclude Acer have put together a pretty great product.

OpenOffice – mostly for students



Since we have tested several laptops which are so well-suited for student use, I have decided to run some tests in OpenOffice (freeware which has the same functions as Microsoft’s Office bundle).

Here are some load times to give you a bit of insight into how quickly the computer loads a standard application like OpenOffice. Most can compare it with the PCs they normally work on.

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