ECS i-Buddie XP Athlon XP 2100+

Performance - Overall Performance

Office Performance Office Productivity SYSMark 2002 Desktop 2100+ Compaq Presario 2800T 1.7GHz ECS i-Buddie XP 2100+ WinBook N4 1.8GHz ECS i-Buddie 4 1.6GHz Toshiba 1905-S277 1.6GHz ASUS S1 1.2GHz PaceBook PaceBlade 600MHz 132 123 119 119 102 99 91 35 | 0 | 26 | 53 | 79 | 106 | 132 | 158

We expected quite a bit of performance out of the ECS i-Buddie XP. Being the first Athlon based mobile system we laid our hands on, we suspected that the 2100+ processor in our i-Buddie XP would blow everything else out of the water. This was not the case.

We can see that the desktop 2100+ system managed to top the performance graphs, outdoing the Compaq Presario 2800T 1.7GHz by 7%. The same configuration in the mobile system did not fare so well, falling 3% behind the Persario 2800T and 11% behind the desktop 2100+. The speed differences between the desktop Athlon system and the i-Buddie XP are likely due to the hard drive difference in the two systems. As we have seen before, notebook hard drives introduce a large bottleneck into mobile systems and this is likely the case here.

We also suspect the reason that the Athlon XP 2100+ desktop system was not able to significantly outperform the Persario 2800T was because of the shared memory architecture used by the SiS 740 chipset. Remember that in a shared memory solution system RAM is used as video memory, not only decreasing the amount of system memory available but more importantly increasing the traffic over the already crowded system memory bus.

The i-Buddie XP with the 2100+ processor was able to outperform its Pentium 4 brother, the i-Buddie 4, by a fairly significant 17%. Keep in mind that this performance delta would decrease and perhaps sway in favor of the i-Buddie 4 with a faster Pentium 4 processor (our test unit only made use of a 1.6GHz Pentium 4).

Overall Performance SYSMark 2002 Compaq Presario 2800T 1.7GHz Desktop 2100+ WinBook N4 1.8GHz ECS i-Buddie XP 2100+ ECS i-Buddie 4 1.6GHz Toshiba 1905-S277 1.6GHz ASUS S1 1.2GHz PaceBook PaceBlade 600MHz 167 160 160 151 141 127 94 39 | 0 | 33 | 67 | 100 | 134 | 167 | 200

Stemming from a lower score on the Internet content creation section of SYSMark 2002, the i-Buddie XP falls some in the overall SYSMark 2002 score. The system is now beat not only by the desktop 2100+ and the Persario 2800T but also by the WinBook N4 1.8GHz. The Persario 2800T outperformed the ECS i-Buddie XP by 11% and the desktop 2100+ by 0.5%. The performance advantage held by the Pentium 4 notebooks suggest again that the SiS 740 chipset is holding the Athlon XP 2100+ back some thanks to its integrated video solution.