Maingear 13.3" Clutch 13 Ultraportable Notebook

Name: Maingear 13.3" Clutch 13 Ultraportable Notebook - Page 5
Brand: Maingear

by Ray Willington — Wednesday, January 12, 2011, 11:00 AM EDT

SiSoftware Sandra & Multimedia Benchmarks

Page 5: SiSoftware Sandra & Multimedia Benchmarks

Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2010

Synthetic Benchmarks

We continued our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2010, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia Memory Bandwidth, Physical Disks). All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default speed along with 8GB of DDR3 RAM running in dual-channel mode.

CPU Arithmetic Test; Click To Enlarge

CPU Multimedia Test; Click To Enlarge

Memory Bandwidth Test; Click To Enlarge

Physical Disc Test; Click To Enlarge

Our gauntlet of SiSoftware SANDRA tests show nice performance. We tried to pit the machine against similar platforms here, and the Core i3 managed to hold its own, particularly against Core 2 Duo CPUs. It also scorched a couple of standard HDDs, but held steady against similar SSDs. The C300 is definitely a solid SSD, but we still aren't convinced it's worth the $305 that Maingear charges you over the 250GB 5400RPM HDD.

To test multimedia capabilities, we attempt to play back a 720p WMVHD clip, a 720p H.264 clip and a 1080p clip. We've also included a screenshot of the 1080p clip from the Mini 311 (which uses the original NVIDIA Ion GPU) to give you a better idea of CPU utilization from a different type of system.

Click To Enlarge; 720 H.264 - Maingear Clutch 13

Click To Enlarge; 720p WMVHD - Maingear Clutch 13

Click To Enlarge; 1080p - Maingear Clutch 13

In our video playback tests, we see that the Clutch 13 is plenty capable of handling high-definition video. Both 720p and 1080p clips were perfectly smooth, even with applications running in the background. If you're only looking for good HD media playback (and don't much care about gaming), this machine is a champ. We'd definitely trust it as a media playback device for HDTVs via HDMI as well. The integrated Intel GPU chipset isn't very powerful, but it handles HD media fine.