ASUS U6S Ultraportable Notebook

Futuremark PCMark Vantage  Gaming, Productivity, Music and Overall

Courtesy, Futuremark:  "Gaming is one of the most popular forms of entertainment for all ages. Today’s games demand high performance graphics cards and CPUs to avoid delays and sluggish performance while playing. Loading screens in games are yesterday’s news. Streaming data from an HDD in games – such as Alan Wake™ – allows for massive worlds and riveting non-stop action. CPUs with many cores give a performance advantage to gamers in real-time strategy and massively multiplayer games. Gaming Suite includes the following tests: "

Gaming 1 - GPU game test
Gaming 2 - HDD: game HDD
Gaming 3 - Two simultaneous threads, CPU game test, Data decompression: level loading
Gaming 4 - Three simultaneous threads, GPU game test, CPU game test, HDD: game HDD

The U6S' GeForce 8400M G, with 128MB of dedicated memory, is seriously out-gunned by the other two notebooks. The 8400M G is the slowest model in the GeForce 8M line-up and is meant to be an alternative to integrated graphics. With only 8 stream processors, the 8400M G does not wield much graphics horsepower compared to its better equipped siblings, however it does perform well compared to integrated solutions as you'll see in later benchmarks.

Vantage Productivity suite includes the following tests:

Productivity 1 - Two simultaneous threads, Text editing, HDD: application loading
Productivity 2 - Two simultaneous threads, Windows Contacts: search, HDD: Windows Defender
Productivity 3 - HDD: Windows Vista start-up
Productivity 4 - Three simultaneous threads, Windows Contacts: search, Windows Mail: Run Message Rules, Web page rendering: simultaneously open various pages from IE7 Favorites in separate tabs, close them one by one

The Vantage Productivity test suite tells a similar story as the Communications suite. The U6S comes in last place due to its slower processor and hard drive speed.

Vantage Music suite includes the following tests:

Music 1 - Three simultaneous threads, Web page rendering – w/ music shop content, Audio transcoding: WAV -> WMA lossless, HDD: Adding music to Windows Media Player
Music 2 - Audio transcoding: WAV -> WMA lossless
Music 3 - Audio transcoding: MP3 -> WMA
Music 4 - Two simultaneous threads, Audio transcoding: WMA -> WMA, HDD: Adding music to Windows Media Player
 

Once again the U6S comes up short due to having the slowest processor of the bunch. However, performance is still respectable for its class.

The overall PCMark Vantage score is a weighted average of all of the modules in the Vantage suite calculated in total "PCMarks".  Here are the results:

The ASUS U6S came in last in each of the Vantage test suites so its overall score is no different. Despite this, the U6S' performance is actually better than expected. As a ultraportable laptop, the U6S didn't have much of a chance against its larger competitors, however it managed to stay in the same ballpark much of the time, which is impressive.