Intel Core 2 Extreme Mobile X9000, Mobile Penryn Speed
Test Systems and SANDRA Synthetics
How We Configured Our Test Systems: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set memory timings for either DDR2-1066 (AMD) with 5,5,5,15 timings, DDR3-1333 with 7,7,7,20 timings (Intel desktops) or DDR2-667 5,5,5,15 (Intel notebooks). The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows Vista Ultimate was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and then ran all of the tests.
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System 1: 2x1GB Corsair DDR3-1800 GeForce 8800 GTX WD740 "Raptor" HD Windows Vista Ultimate |
System 2: 2x1GB Corsair PC2-8500 GeForce 8800 GTX WD740 "Raptor" HD Windows Vista Ultimate |
System 3: Dell M1730 w/ Core 2 Extreme Mobile X7900, RAID 0 |
Test Methodology Note: We should provide a bit of explanation on our test methodologies before you dive into the numbers in the following pages. As you'll note, there are a number of desktop component-based test systems listed above, as well as three notebooks. For our PCMark Vantage testing, since a more system-wide test suite is employed, we compared our Core 2 Extreme Mobile X9000-based Dell XPS M1730 scores to three other notebook configurations from Dell, Toshiba and Asus. Then for the rest of our CPU performance-focused testing, we provided you comparison reference numbers from competitive Core 2 Duo E6600 and E6850, as well as AMD Phenom X3 8750 desktop test systems. These various reference points should give you a solid picture of how this new mobile CPU performs in terms of raw compute power, as well as a high level view of loosely how it performs in a notebook configuration. It should be noted however that the notebook configurations listed above are not identical specifications between the group, so notebook comparison data is provided as a frame of reference only.
We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA XII, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran three of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA XII suite with Intel's new Core 2 Extreme Mobile X9000 processor, (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, and Memory Bandwidth). All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default clock speed of 2.8GHz, with 2GB of DDR2-667 system memory.
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Left to right - SANDRA CPU, Memory and Multimedia Tests
The performance levels SANDRA is reporting here are pretty much on par with what we expected from a combination of this new notebook chip and its relatively modest motherboard and system memory architecture. Though the X9000 has a clock speed and cache advantage over some of the chips listed in the test reference system list, the M7130's Intel 965 Express chipset and DDR2-667 memory hold back some of its performance. Relatively speaking though, performance of the system is solid, easily placing these numbers at the top-end of notebook system performance.
