Gateway P-6831FX Gaming Notebook

We continue our test coverage with more modules from the comprehensive PCMark Vantage suite of benchmarks.

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 PCMark Vantage gaming tests have significant CPU intensive components. While the graphics card does play a role here in this module, it isn't a graphics specific test. This explains why the P-6831FX did so poorly. Despite having a fast graphics card, the slow processor let the P-6831FX down, landing it in last place.

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 tests the system's processing, storage and memory systems. This is unfortunate since none of these are the P-6831FX's strong points. It comes in last place by a rather wide margin.

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
 

The P-6831FX technically comes in last in the music module, but it is basically tied with the Toshiba A305. The music module involves a lot of audio transcoding, which is a processor and memory intensive task.

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:

Since the P-6831FX came in last place in nearly every single module, it's not surprising that it would come in last for the overall score. So far we've seen that the P-6831FX is poorly equipped for standard productivity tasks. Up next are some gaming benchmarks, the P-6831FX's strength. Hopefully it does better than what we've seen so far.