HP TouchSmart 600 All-In-One PC Review

	Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2009
	Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA suite (Processor Arithmetic, Processor Multi-Media, Memory Bandwidth, and Physical Disks).



The TouchSmart 600 is many things, but one thing it is not is a computing powerhouse. Then again, no one should expect an all-in-one desktop PC using a 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Mobile P7450 processor to break any performance speed records. That said, the TouchSmart 600’s overall performance on the SANDRA tests indicates that the system performs inline with the level of performance you would expect from its specs--which is another way of saying that the system is fast enough to handle just about any typical mainstream task you could throw at it. We wouldn’t use the system for HD video editing, but we would use it for watching HD videos.
For our next round of benchmarks, we ran the complete Futuremark PCMark Vantage test suite. This component of our testing provides a solid assessment of a system's overall performance.

"The PCMark Suite is a collection of various single- and multi-threaded CPU, Graphics, and HDD test sets with the focus on Windows Vista application tests. Tests have been selected to represent a subset of the individual Windows Vista Consumer scenarios. The PCMark Suite includes CPU, Graphics, Hard Disk Drive (HDD), and a subset of Consumer Suite tests."


The results of our PCMark Vantage test tell us the same thing that the SANDRA tests do: The TouchSmart 600 has middling overall performance, but even so, your everyday apps should run without a hiccup. Also take note that the TouchSmart 600’s performance is not too far behind that of the Velocity Micro Z55, which uses a faster, quad-core 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Q9450 processor.

Cinebench R10 is an OpenGL 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by 3D animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of system processor resources and is an excellent gauge of pure computational throughput. Cinebench is a multi-threaded, multi-processor-aware benchmark that renders a single 3D scene and tracks the length of the entire process.


The Cinebench results tell us two things. The first is that the TouchSmart 600’s single-threaded application performance is not the fastest in town, but it is passable. Even though we’re well on our way to a multi-threaded-application world, there are still plenty of apps and tasks that don’t take direct advantage of a CPU’s additional cores. Which leads us to the second point, which is that the TouchSmart 600’s dual-core processor can’t hold a candle to quad-core processors when it comes to multi-threaded performance. This is an important fact to digest--as more and more applications are designed to utilize multi-core processors, the TouchSmart 600’s pokey dual-core processor will be left further behind in the dust. The system’s processor might be good enough for many of today’s mainstream applications, but its capabilities with tomorrow’s apps remains questionable. In short, the TouchSmart 600’s Core 2 Duo P7450 processor is not very future proof, though again, it's what you'd expect in a system built with a low power mobile processor under the hood.