Hypersonic Sonic Aviator 3.06GHz Pentium 4

Performance - MobileMark 2002

Time for the MobileMark 2002 scores, we we find out how long a notebook system lasts under battery power in fairly stressful situations. Let's see how the powerful Hypersonic Sonic Aviator 3.06GHz performs on the road.

Battery Life (minutes) MobileMark 2002 Dell Inspiron 8200 2.0GHz Compaq Presario 900 1500+ WinBook J4 2.4GHz Hypersonic Aviator 3.06GHz 512MB 305 170 156 82 | 0 | 61 | 122 | 183 | 244 | 305 | 366

MobileMark 2002 shows that not only is the Hypersonic Sonic Aviator powerful, it is also power hungry. The battery lasted for only 82 minutes total under load paling in comparison to the 150+ minutes that we have come to expect from notebooks. We can attribute this power battery life to a number of things.

First off, the desktop processor that the Sonic Aviator uses draws substantially more power than the mobile Pentium 4-M chips. The desktop chips do not have the power saving features enabled in the mobile Pentium 4-M chips, such as SpeedStep technology, and therefore draw more power while on battery.

Secondly, the extremely high clock speed of the processor used in the Sonic Aviator means it sucks power much faster than lower clocked processors. Adding to this is the 533MHz front side bus that the Sonic Aviator employs. The higher front side bus speed increases power consumption over 400MHz front side bus mobile systems, such as those based on slower Pentium 4 chips and all Mobile Pentium 4-M chips.

Thirdly, the 5400RPM drive used in the system draws more power than 4200RPM drives used in other notebooks. Sure, the 5400RPM drives are faster but they consume much more power. This 5400RPM drive (the Toshiba MK4019GAX) requires 5.0 watts to start, 2.9 watts to seek, and 1.05 watts while idle. This compares to a typical 4200RPM drive which consumers 2.7 watts at start, 2.45 watts while seeking, and 0.80 watts while idle.

Finally, the bright backlight of the Hypersonic Sonic Aviator can be pegged as a major source of power draw. Although the Sonic Aviator had a number of brightness steps, the difference between the most bright setting and the least bright were hardly noticeable. The darkest setting that the system's backlight would go to was well brighter than the medium settings we typically test notebook systems at.

All these factors combined to significantly reduce the battery life of the Hypersonic Sonic Aviator. Because of it's short-lived battery life, we could not get any performance numbers out of MobileMark 2002. The benchmark would not complete a full run of the tests in the 82 minutes that the battery lasted and therefore would not output a performance score. It is pretty clear that Hypersonic needs to either take steps to decrease power consumption on the 3.06GHz Sonic Aviator or use a battery besides the 4000mA standard battery.