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MillimeterTest Drive: HP Compaq 8710p, Part 2
Nov 26, 2007 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer
In our last segment, I reviewed the features and usability of HP’s Compaq 8710p notebook computer. In this segment, I’ll review performance, comparing the 8710p against two other HP computers: a Single Processor, Quad-Core xw4600, and Dual Processor, Quad-Core Intel Xeon xw8400. The relative specs are shown in Table 1.
Table 1. Our contenders.
Click here for a larger image
Interestingly, before the Core2 Duo era, portable and desktop processors used fundamentally different architectures, with portable processors optimized for power efficiency and desktop processors for performance. In those days, you couldn’t use comparative processor speed to predict competitive performance.
Today, all three processors come from the same family and use the same underlying technology, so processor speed should directly impact performance. That is, even with a program that uses only a single core for processing, the 3GHz QX6850 should perform about 36 percent faster than the 2.2GHz T7500 processor in the 8710p. Looking at pure, theoretical processing power (number of cores times the clock speed), I would expect the xw4600 to outperform the 8710p by about 2.72X and the xw8400 by about 4.8X.
Throw in the fact that the notebook was running Windows Vista, and the other two XP, and I predicted a disparity at least 25 percent greater, which was the performance delta I’ve seen in the past between the same system running Vista and XP. Happily from the perspective of the notebook owner, the differences were usually much, much less.
To assess the 8710p’s competitive performance, I tested three classes of products, video editors, 3D design and streaming encoders. Here’s what I found.
