Gateway P-6831FX Gaming Notebook

Name: Gateway P-6831FX Gaming Notebook - Page 6
Brand: Gateway

by Michael Lin — Wednesday, July 02, 2008, 12:00 PM EDT

Futuremark PCMark Vantage

For our next round of benchmarks, we ran the complete Futuremark PCMark Vantage test suite.

"The PCMark Suite is a collection of various single- and multi-threaded CPU, Graphics and HDD test sets with the focus on Windows Vista application tests. Tests have been selected to represent a subset of the individual Windows Vista Consumer scenarios. The PCMark Suite includes CPU, Graphics, Hard Disk Drive (HDD) and a subset of Consumer Suite tests."

Futuremark PCMark Vantage

'Memories', HDD and Communications

The PCMark Vantage "Memories" suite includes the following tests:

Memories 1 - Two simultaneous threads, CPU image manipulation and HDD picture import
Memories 2 - Two simultaneous threads, GPU image manipulation and HDD video editing
Memories 3 - Video Transcoding: DV to portable device
Memories 4 - Video Transcoding: media server archive to portable device

The P-6831FX comes in last place in the PCMark Vantage Memories test. The DDR2-667 memory under the hood of the P-6831FX isn't uncommonly fast and in combination with the slow processor results in a relatively unimpresive showing.

The Vantage HDD suite includes the following tests:

HDD 1 - HDD: Windows Defender
HDD 2 - HDD: game HDD
HDD 3 - HDD: importing pictures
HDD 4 - HDD: Windows Vista start-up
HDD 5 - HDD: video editing
HDD 6 - HDD: Media Center
HDD 7 - HDD: Adding music to Windows Media Player

The P-6831FX's sluggish 5400RPM hard drive lands it in second last place. Hard drive performance on the P-6831FX was not observed to be very good during regular usage. Copying files and installing programs seems to take longer than it should, even when the 5400RPM hard drive is taken into consideration. Load time in games was a bit longer too, but it wasn't that noticeable during our testing.

Vantage Communications suite includes the following tests:

Communications 1 - Three simultaneous threads, Data encryption: CNG AES CBC, Data compression, Web page rendering: graphics content, 1024x768, windowed
Communications 2 - Three simultaneous threads. Web page rendering: open various news pages from IE 7 Favorites in separate tabs, close them one by one, Data decryption: CNG AES CBC, HDD: Windows Defender
Communications 3 - Windows Mail: Search
Communications 4 - Two simultaneous threads, Data encryption: CNG AES CBC, Audio transcoding: WMA -> WMA - to simulate VOIP

Once again, the P-6831FX comes in last place. This time by a relatively significant amount. Its slower processor is the likely the culprit in this case. Data transcoding can be a fairly CPU intensive operation and the 1.67GHz T5450 powering the P-6831FX isn't able to keep up with the much faster processors of the other notebooks tested here.