Hewlett Packard EliteBook 8560p Notebook Review

Name: Hewlett Packard EliteBook 8560p
Brand: Hewlett

by Paul Lilly — Tuesday, May 31, 2011, 10:30 AM EDT

PCMark & 3DMark Tests

Page 4: PCMark & 3DMark Tests

To start things off, we fired up Futuremark's system performance benchmark, PCMark Vantage. This synthetic benchmark suite simulates a range of real-world scenarios and workloads, stressing various system subsets in the process. Everything you'd want to do with your PC -- watching HD movies, music compression, image editing, gaming, and so forth -- is represented here, and most of the tests are multi-threaded, making this a good indicator of all-around performance.

Futuremark PCMark Vantage

Simulated Application Performance

Color us a little bit surprised. While HP's EliteBook 8560p can't match Maingear's eX-L 15 desktop replacement in PCMark Vantage, it outpaced every other recent notebook we've reviewed. We ran PCMark twice just to make sure it wasn't a hiccup, but both times, the 8650p managed to outrun its counterparts.

3DMark06

Details: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmark06/

The Futuremark 3DMark06 CPU benchmark consists of tests that use the CPU to render 3D scenes, rather than the GPU. It runs several threads simultaneously and is designed to utilize multiple processor cores.

Just as we would expect, the 8560p's Sandy Bridge processor and Huron River platform give the system a sizable advantage in CPU performance against previous generation notebooks, and a 2.7GHz clockspeed doesn't hurt. We would have thrown more modern notebooks into the mix, but the 8560p is one of the few 15.6-inch business class laptops to come through our labs in awhile; recently reviewed notebooks have mostly fallen into the desktop replacement and/or gaming categories (in which we don't bother with 3DMark06), or ultraportables with lower end chips.

Futuremark 3DMark11

Synthetic DirectX Gaming

Futuremark 3DMark11

The latest version of Futuremark's synthetic 3D gaming benchmark, 3DMark11, is specifically bound to Windows Vista and 7-based systems because it uses the advanced visual technologies that are only available with DirectX 11, which isn't available on previous versions of Windows. 3DMark11 isn't simply a port of 3DMark Vantage to DirectX 11, though. With this latest version of the benchmark, Futuremark has incorporated four new graphics tests, a physics tests, and a new combined test. We tested the graphics cards here with 3DMark11's Extreme preset option, which uses a resolution of 1920x1080 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering.

After recording a rather anemic 3DMark11 score using the benchmark suite's Advanced setting, we didn't even bother to torture test the 8560p with the Extreme preset. The idea seemed cruel to us and the point was already made -- this isn't a PC for gamers (nor is it intended to be).