Centrino Duo Whitebook: A Do-It-Yourself Laptop

Performance Comparisons with 3DMark06 v1.0.2 Details: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmark06/

3DMark06

Futuremark's latest incarnation of their popular synthetic benchmarking software is updated in a number of ways, and now includes not only Shader Model 2.0 tests, but Shader Model 3.0 and HDR tests as well. Some of the assets from 3DMark05 have been re-used, but the scenes are now rendered with much more geometric detail and the shader complexity is vastly increased as well. Max shader length in 3DMark05 was 96 instructions, while 3DMark06 ups the number of instructions to 512. 3DMark06 also employs much more lighting, and there is extensive use of soft shadows. With 3DMark06, Futuremark has also updated how the final score is tabulated. In this latest version of the benchmark, SM 2.0 and HDR / SM3.0 tests are weighted and the CPU score is factored into the final tally as well.

The ASUS Z96JS's Mobility Radeon X1600 barely broke 2,000 points and is no match for the GeForce 7900s, as expected. The X1600 is meant to be a mid-range solution and it can't be expected to compete with the high-end gaming oriented 7900 screamers. The GeForce Go 6600 is a much more suitable target for comparison, since it too is marketed as a mid-range graphics solution. However, the 6600 is at a disadvantage since it has half the RAM of the X1600 and it does not meet 3Dmark06's minimum requirement for 256MB of RAM. The Whitebook's combination of a faster processor and superior graphics allow it to handily best the Area51 m5500, earning it more than twice the 3Dmarks. Intel's integrated graphics solution comes in dead last and was barely able to complete the tests.

Performance Comparisons with Quake 4 Details: http://www.quake4game.com/

Quake 4

id Software, in conjunction with developer Raven, released the latest addition to the wildly popular Quake franchise, Quake 4. Quake 4 is based upon an updated and slightly modified version of the Doom 3 engine, and as such, performance characteristics between the two titles are very similar.  Like Doom 3, Quake 4 is also an OpenGL game that uses extremely high-detailed textures and a ton of dynamic lighting and shadows, but unlike Doom3, Quake 4 features some outdoor environments as well. We ran these Quake 4 benchmarks using a custom demo with the game set to its "High-Quality" mode, at resolutions of 800x600 and 1024x768 without anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering enabled and the aspect ratio set to "Widescreen".

At 1024x768 with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering disabled, Quake 4 was very playable at 42 frames per second on our Whitebook. While the X1600 driving our the Asus Z96JS was able to dominate the GeForce 6600 and the m5500 when it came to 3D Mark, Quake 4 shows us a different story. Here, we see the X1600 just barely beating the 6600 by a little over one FPS. OpenGL games have always favored NVIDIA's offerings and we can see that nothing has changed with Quake 4 in this mobile computing setup.