Toshiba M35-S320 Laptop Review - Tests - SiSoft Sandra 2004, PCMark2002
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I tested the Toshiba M35-S320 against an older Sony VAIO R505 notebook and my current desktop computer. The R505 uses an Intel Mobile Pentium III-M 1GHz processor w/ 512K L2 cache, 133MHz system bus, 30GB internal hard drive and 256MB PC133 ram (versus the M35's 1.5GHz P4-M 1MB cache, 400MHz system bus, and 512MB DDR single channel ram). The R505 also uses an Intel 830 chipset with Intel 82830M Extreme Graphics. The desktop computer is an Intel 2.4B overclocked to 3.06GHz at 170FSB (680MHz system bus), 1GB Kingston HyperX @ DDR340 in dual channel, Abit IS7 i865 motherboard, RAID0 array of 7,200RPM hard drives, and GeForce3 Ti200. I'm using the Ti200 as it is a closer reference to the M35's Go5200 GPU.
Jumping straight into SiSoft Sandra's CPU arithmetic benchmark, we see that the M35's 1.5GHz P4-M processor is significantly more powerful than the older 1GHz PIII-M processor. The M35 scores pretty high in the Whetstone FPU test relative to the P4 3.06GHz desktop, which shows the strength of Intel's mobile processors. Turning to Dhrystone ALU or Whetstone iSSE2 however, the desktop shows it simply cannot be beat by the M35 notebook.
The differences between the three setups are less prominent in this CPU multimedia test than the previous test. Still however, the desktop is significantly faster than the M35 and the M35 is significantly faster than the R505. Expect this trend to continue.
All three setups' performances are on par with what their system specifications should be producing. The M35's single channel DDR scores in the 2000s, the R505's older PC133 memory scores in the 700s, and the desktop's dual channel DDR scores 4000+. I've yet to see any mainstream laptops use dual channel DDR so until then, desktops remain king of memory performance.
While the M35's 60GB internal IDE 4,200RPM hard drive is significantly faster than the R505's drive 30GB internal drive, it is (obviously) no match for the desktop's RAID0 array of two Western Digital 40GB 7,200RPM 2MB cache drives. Toshiba could have used a faster RPM drive with 8MB cache to boost hard drive speed. The current drive sacrifices speed for lower power usage, lower noise, and lower cost.
The CPU, memory, and hard drive scores from PCMark2002 basically mirror what SiSoft Sandra reported. The M35 is not quite as fast as the desktop in all respects but is a significant improvement over an older yet still respectable R505 laptop.
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