ATi Mobility Radeon 9700

Test System Details & Winstones

 

CONFIGURATION / TESTING METHODS: We tested the ATi Mobility Radeon 9700 with a Eurocom notebook powered by a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 processor.  The rest of the system's components consisted of 1024GB of RAM (512MBx2), dual 60GB hard drives, a DVD drive and a motherboard based on Intel's i865 "Springdale" chipset.  We lacked another notebook with similar specs, driven by a different GPU, so throughout this review we've compared the Mobility Radeon 9700's performance to a similarly configured desktop machine using two different graphics cards, a 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro and a 128MB Radeon 9600 XT.

To keep as many system configurations variables as similar as possible, we installed the same Intel chipset drivers and the same version of ATi's Catalyst Driver Suite on the laptop and desktop machines.  We also configured Windows in the exact same manner and installed every available Windows Update.  Before benchmarking, we removed Messenger from the system, set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance" and then installed our benchmarking software.  We ran all of the following tests with the video drivers configured for maximum visual quality.

HotHardware's Test Systems
High-End Intel Powered Systems
Processor:
Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz

Motherboard:
Eurocom
i865P "Springdale" Chipset

System Memory:
1024MB DDR PC3200 RAM

Graphics Card:
Mobility Radeon 9700 (256MB)

Drivers:
Intel Chipset Drivers
ATi Catalyst 4.4
DirectX 9.0B

On Board Audio

Hard Drive:
Dual IBM Travelstar 60GB

Processor:
Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz

Motherboard:
DFI LANPARTY Pro875B
i875P "Canterwood" Chipset

System Memory:
1024MB Kingston HyperX PC3500

Graphics Card:
ATi Radeon 9800 Pro (256MB)

Drivers:
Intel Chipset Drivers
ATi Catalyst 4.4
DirectX 9.0B

On Board Audio

Hard Drive:
Western Digital "Raptor"
36GB - 10,000RPM - SATA

Processor:
Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz

Motherboard:
DFI LANPARTY Pro875B
i875P "Canterwood" Chipset

System Memory:
1024MB Kingston HyperX PC3500

Graphics Card:
ATi Radeon 9600 XT (128MB)

Drivers:
Intel Chipset Drivers
ATi Catalyst 4.4
DirectX 9.0B

On Board Audio

Hard Drive:
Western Digital "Raptor"
36GB - 10,000RPM - SATA


Real World Application Performance
Not Exactly related to Video Performance...

ZD's Business and Content Creation Winstone 2004 benchmarks aren't meant to test video performance, but because many of you have asked if a "desktop replacement" notebook, like the one we're testing here, is really as fast as a high-end desktop machine, we thought we'd throw in some scores just for a point of reference.

Business Winstone 2004

_Microsoft Access 2002
_Microsoft Excel 2002
_Microsoft FrontPage 2002
_Microsoft Outlook 2002
_Microsoft PowerPoint 2002
_Microsoft Project 2002
_Microsoft Word 2002
_Norton Antivirus Professional 2003
_WinZip 8.1
Content Creation 2004

_Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1
_Adobe Premiere 6.50
_Macromedia Director MX 9.0
_Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 6.1
_Microsoft Windows Media
_Encoder 9 Version 9
_NewTek's LightWave 3D 7.5b
_Steinberg WaveLab 4.0f

 

We're not going to dwell on these scores much, as they're more of an indication of total system performance than anything else.  The somwhat low scores can not be attributed to the Mobility Radeon 9700.  As you can see in the graphs above, however, the notebook wasn't quite able to hang with the desktop systems.  However, it did come close.  We suspect that with a faster hard drive (the mobile Travelstars simply can't hold a candle to WD's Raptor) and lower latency RAM, the notebook's performance would be right up there with the desktop machines.  Who says a high-end machine needs to be crammed into a full tower?


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