Intel Core 2 Extreme Mobile X9000, Mobile Penryn Speed

We ran three competitive notebooks, including another Dell XPS M1730 with a RAID 0 array and a Core 2 Extreme Mobile X7900 CPU, along with a Dell XPS M1730 with a single drive and the X9000 chip, through Futuremark’s latest system performance metric built especially for Windows Vista. PCMark Vantage runs through a host of different usage scenarios to simulate different types of workloads including High Definition TV, movie playback and manipulation, gaming, image editing and manipulation, music compression, communications, and productivity.  Most of the tests are multi-threaded as well, so the tests can exploit the additional resources offered by a multi-core CPU.

It's a little difficult to draw definitive conclusions from the above graph, since PCMark Vantage tests take into account virtually all aspects of system performance, from the CPU to system memory, graphics and the storage subsystem.  However, two bars in the graph do stand out in favor of the Core 2 Extreme Mobile X9000, the Gaming and Memories tests.  The gaming test shows favoritism more-so as a result of the GPUs enabled in our notebook test system that is powered by a pair of GeForce 8800M GTX GPUs in SLI.  However, the Memories test, which is particularly processor dependent, shows a specific advantage to the Core 2 Extreme Mobile X9000.  Here, where applications like image manipulation and Video Transcoding, require large amounts of memory bandwidth, the X9000 pulls ahead, most likely due in-part to its larger 6MB of L2 cache.